


The Winds of Fichina

by Galsult



Series: The Worlds of Lylat [4]
Category: Star Fox Series
Genre: Crime Drama, M/M, The mafia but in space, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-02-28 16:26:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18760096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galsult/pseuds/Galsult
Summary: There's a storm brewing in the depths of the criminal underworld - and to get to the bottom of it, Corneria turns to an unlikely ally: Star Wolf.





	1. Chapter 1

# Prologue

 

_Nikolai is dead_.

The sentence played on repeat in her mind, as it had all throughout the day, ever since her contact informed her about it that morning over breakfast.  The taste of her poached eggs had soured in her mouth, and that sourness lingered all through the afternoon and well into the evening.

_Nikolai is dead_.

Three words that changed everything.  Nikolai Volskov was not simply the arbitrator of the status quo on Fichina – he _was_ the status quo.  House Volskov was premier amongst the Fichina Families, and everyone who was anyone had done business with their overseer at some point.  His centralization of and dominance over the criminal world ensured a modicum of comparative peace amongst the Families for over thirty years.

_Nikolai is dead_.

All of that down the drain with a blaster bolt to the back of the head.  And the timing couldn’t possibly have been worse, what with the Enclave meeting in a little over a week.  Catarina was no fool – she knew the timing couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.  Even if she had no proof, her gut instincts told her as much.  And she had _very_ good instincts.

_Nikolai is dead._

And this right after that buffoonish Tertulli, too, before he even had a chance to assume his seat at the table.  That was two dead members of the Enclave in much too short a period of time.  Corneria was involved with Tertulli’s death – were they also behind Nikolai’s?

_Nikolai is dead._

No, that made no sense.  Assassination wasn’t Corneria’s style.  Someone from within killed him, it was the only possibility.

But who?  One of the other Families, seeking to topple his empire and take the top spot for themselves?  That would be utter foolishness; the Families had never been as prosperous as they had been as under Nikolai’s reign.  But then again, she knew to never underestimate the ability of power-lust to blind an animal’s better judgment.  If it really was an inside job, then doubtless she’d find herself at the top of everyone’s suspect list, seeing as House Illya was easily the second most-powerful after the Volskovs.  She had the most to gain from his death.

_Nikolai is dead_.

The cougar retreated from her vigil at the window and meandered over to the fireplace.  The manse of House Illya was large and imposing, and it wasn’t exactly comfortable.  Gray stone walls, high vaulted ceilings, tall gothic windows – it had the air of a cathedral about it.  She stood there staring into the flames for an indeterminable amount of time, glass of sherry in hand.  The igneous glow of the fireplace painted the room in stark relief, clashing with the pallid snow-white beams of light filtering through the windows.

Her almost-hypnotic fixation on the fire was interrupted by the rumble of her comm-device.  She drew it from the pocket of her silk business slacks and answered impatiently.

“What?”

“M’lady?  You have visitors.”

Catarina let out a huff.  “Tell them to call back and set something up, I don’t do walk-ins.”  The last thing she felt like dealing with at the moment was some poor clown pestering her for a loan, or a job, or whatever the prole wanted.

“…They say they’re not going to leave, m’lady.  They’re adamant about a meeting.”  Her secretary paused.  His voice contained a bit more fear than it usually did.  “It’s an Anglar, and some mercenaries, I think.”

The cougar’s face drained of color, and she felt a wave of nausea overtake her.

She was wrong: _this_ was the last thing she felt like dealing with at the moment.

But it was also something she couldn’t put off so easily.  “Send him up.”

“…M’lady?”

“You heard me”, she bit back.  “Send.  Him.  _Up._ ”

“Yes, m’lady.  Of course, m’lady.”

She hung up on him with a curse and downed the rest of her sherry in one go, half a glass-worth.  It burned its way down her throat like a fiery serpent, settling in her stomach and setting it ablaze.

How long had it been since they’d last spoken?  A year at least, surely.  She thought she’d made it clear then that she wasn’t interested in doing business in person anymore, that it was too risky to sell weapons to someone like him, even in secret.  That hadn’t stopped her from continuing via middlemen, though.

But the last time they scheduled an exchange, he hadn’t showed.  In fact, her eyes and ears throughout the system said he’d dropped off the map completely.  Catarina assumed he’d finally pissed off the wrong person and gotten himself killed, and was more than happy to wash her hands of the whole situation and put it behind her.

But now, here he was, seemingly back from the dead.

_This day keeps getting better and better_.

She moved back to the window and waited, paws grasped behind her back.  The view was pretty in a cold, unfeeling way.  Quite literally, in fact.  Fichina was livable, but there was always at least a dusting of snow, and the nights lasted twice as long as the days.  She could see the twinkling lights of the town at the foot of the hill her manse was seated on, and the majestic aurora that weaved across the sky like a ribbon.

She tried to lose herself in the beauty when she heard him approach her door.  It was hard not to, the clanging knock of his cane against the flagstone floors of her manse echoing sharply through the hall.  Getting closer.  And closer.  And _closer_.

Finally, it stopped.  She cleared her throat and mentally prepared herself.

“You may enter”.

The wide double-doors to the room opened inward, each pushed by a large hammerhead.  He always did prefer to go outside the system for his hired muscle, she thought.

They stood aside to allow their master entrance.  He took in the room for just a second before beginning his long march to its center, the metallic clang of his cane all the sharper for its proximity.

His gait was as awkward as ever, she noted – a limping thing that came in fits and starts, his hunched form relying entirely on the cane to stay upright.  His head darted from side to side as he moved, wavering on the edge between analytical and paranoid.  He only had one eye, and it was riddled with cataracts – the other was closed shut forever, that half of his face mangled and burned.

But it was his breathing that caused Catarina to shudder.  His respirator filled with saltwater ringed around the lower half of his grotesque head; and the sound of his gills opening and closing, filtering the water in and out, sounded like the death rattles of a man with lung cancer.

He stopped in the middle of the room, half-lit by the cold pristine light of the windows, and half by the raging glow of the fire.  Catarina thought it poetic which type of light shined on which half of his body.

“Well…” he said with a rasp, his gravelly tenor magnified by the respirator, just a hint of a mechanical echo to it.  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Lady Illya?”

She nodded at him, utterly composed.  “General Baloz.”

She pointedly glanced at the sharks still flanking the entrance to the room, and Baloz followed her gaze. 

“No need to fear, my lady.  They won’t harm you – they’re quite well-trained, I promise.”

“I know they won’t hurt me, you fool.  That’s not what I’m worried about.”

Baloz cocked his head, an awkward gesture considering how large it was and how smoothly it flowed into the rest of his body.  “Oh?  You’re afraid they’ll… tell tales on us, then?”  He paused in the middle of his sentence to take a deep breath from the respirator.  “Fear not on that account, either.”

Catarina frowned, but ultimately nodded.  It was one of the unwritten rules of conduct in the Families – you just simply didn’t kiss and tell, not without ruining your reputation.  She had to trust Baloz to follow suit.

That was a difficult thing to do, though.

“Why are you here, anyway?”, she bit out.  “I’ve told you before that I don’t want to see you in person, and you skipped our last scheduled exchange.”

The Anglar made a sound she assumed must be a laugh; a halting, jagged, painful noise that sounded like someone being force-fed rocks.  “About the exchange: I was… preoccupied.  You have my sincerest apologies for missing it.”

She glared at him.  “I don’t want your apologies; I want an explanation.  If you wanted to schedule another pick-up, you didn’t have to come here – you could’ve just sought out one of my underlings.”

He nodded.  “True.  I didn’t come to schedule an exchange though.”  His eyes narrowed, and she could’ve sworn he was smiling, though she had no way to tell with the respirator.  “I have more weapons now than I could ever need.”

Her own eyes narrowed at that.  She didn’t like this.  _Any_ of this.

“Then why, pray tell, are you _here?_ ”

“To give you an ultimatum.”

The room was silent save for the sounds of the struggling respirator and crackling flame.  Catarina drew herself up to her full height – she was at least a foot and a half taller than the Anglar, and she hoped the height difference would help to make her more imposing than she felt.

“You dare enter _my_ manse, waste _my_ time, and dictate terms to _me?_ ”

Baloz shuffled from one foot to the other, his body softly swaying back and forth as he stood, only the cane standing still.  “They’re not _my_ terms, my lady.  They’re those of my… benefactor.”

She frowned at him.  “Your new arms dealer, you mean?”

“That, and much more.”  He took another deep breath from the respirator, the gasping sound sending a shiver down her spine.  “There’s a storm coming, my lady.  The old ways aren’t going to survive, I can promise you that.”

She felt an involuntary subvocal growl escape her throat; Baloz made no sign he noticed it.  “And you’re going to start this… _storm?_ ”

He shook his head.  “No.  I’m going to ride it.”  He paused for a beat, and she saw a dangerous look in his eye.  It was the hint of madness she saw in him in their past meetings, the same hint that drove her to only contact him through intermediaries.

That eye bore into her even now, making her feel as if it undressed her skin and stared at her insides.  “I can read the signs.  Can you?”

She turned from him on her heel, sick of that penetrating gaze, and paced back to the window.  “This is ridiculous.  Get out of my sight – I’m done with you.”

“You haven’t listened to my ultimatum yet.”

She whipped her head towards him with a snarl.  “And what makes you think I even _want_ to?”

He took another wheezing breath and stared at her.  “I thought you had better survival instincts than Volskov.  I guess I was wrong.”

She froze.  Things were starting to make more sense – it’s just that the sense they made filled her with disgust.

And fear.

“…What do you want?”

The Anglar looked pleased.  “The Enclave.”

She looked at him with confusion; it was hardly what she was expecting.  “That’s it?  A seat at the Enclave is simple.  Nikolai wouldn’t give you that?”

He shook his head, and this time she _knew_ he was smiling.  “You misunderstand, my lady.”

Realization began to dawn on her, and –

“That’s not possible, you fool!  The Enclave isn’t… it isn’t a _thing_ to be given away.”  His request was impossible; surely he knew this?  “I couldn’t hand it to you even if I wanted to.  It’s not mine to control.  It’s not _anyone’s_ to control!”

“Not yet.”

She shook her head.  “You’re not making any sense.”

He struck his cane on the floor with a loud _clang_ , causing her to jump.  “I’m making perfect sense”, he all but yelled.  “You’re just _not listening_.”

She took a deep breath and considered his words.  She began to pace back and forth across the room, and his gaze never faltered in tracking her.

“Even if it were possible, that I could just… _take it over_ – why would I do it?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”  The Anglar said it casually, without a hint of rage, or contempt, or any emotion at all.  “Then I’ll ask the _third_ -most prominent Family to do it.  And if they don’t, I’ll kill them, and then I’ll ask the fourth in line.”

He paused, letting his words sink in.

She shook her head in disbelief.  “And what if we all say no?  What if you kill off every single member of the Enclave down to the lowest mite?  You’ll have no control over _any_ of it.”

The Anglar tilted his head back and forth in a see-saw fashion.  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

She finally understood, and her understanding only cemented what she had suspected from the beginning, when she first met him all the way back on Zoness:

_Baloz is insane_.

“…I’m not sure I can do it.”

He nodded at her.  “But you can _try_.  That’s all I ask for.”  He took another halting breath.  “My benefactor promises your survival as long as you make the attempt.  He’s understanding about the possibility of failure.”

She scoffed at that.  “Well, he sounds like a truly altruistic animal.”

Baloz’s eyes narrowed in another possible smile.  “More than you might think.”  He leaned his head back to face the ceiling, and she thought she saw something akin to happiness in his eye.  “Times are changing, my lady.  It’s time we change along with them.”

He leaned back down to look her in the eyes, something inscrutable in his own.  “I’ll be in contact.”

With that, he awkwardly turned around, hobbling out of the room the same way he came in, cane clanging on the ground with every limping step forward.  She stood in silence as he exited into the hall beyond without so much as a backward glance, his guards wordlessly shutting the doors behind them.

Catarina let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and felt a chill overtake her body that had nothing to do with the temperature.  The damnable Anglar was right – things _were_ changing.  The last vestige of Andross’ rule dead with Andrew Oikonny, Corneria sinking its teeth into planets like Titania, these whispered rumblings of a nameless war on the fringes…

_And Nikolai is dead._

She raised her paw to her eyes and let out the solitary sob that had been building up all day.

_Madness_ , she thought.  _Pure madness_.

And that madness came in the guise of a deformed Anglar with an equally deformed mind, acting as the willing puppet of an unknown, distant darkness.

And now she was the puppet of a puppet.  What did that make her?  Perhaps they were all puppets in the end, controlled by strings of history stretching so far into the past their origin couldn’t be ascertained.

She poured herself another glass of sherry with shaky paws, and stared off into space.

_Nikolai is dead._

_And I’m probably next._


	2. Chapter 2

# I

 

“Add on those 25s”, Wolf dictated to Panther.  The feline grumbled about being his ‘servant’ while he added the weights to the bar.

“You know you have paws of your own, correct?”

Wolf scoffed.  _Always so formal, this one_.  In truth, it was Panther’s professionalism and ability to massage problematic situations that made him so invaluable.  Wolf could rib on his formality all he wanted, but Panther balanced out his impulsive tendencies.  Their unspoken ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine was a winning combination.

“Yeah but then I’d have to actually, you know.  _Get up_.”

The lupine began another set of bench presses, Panther spotting him with a bored expression.  “You’re remarkably lazy for a dreaded lord of pirates, you know that?”

“ _Former lord of pirates_ ”, Wolf grunted out between reps, earning another grumble from the prudish feline.

The gym of the Airgead, Star Wolf’s home cruiser, was as much a makeshift affair as the rest of the ship.  Musty plast-metal walls spotted with rust in the corners, a thin film of grime on the floor, never quite enough lighting (and what little there was being provided by fluorescent overheads that gave everything a washed-out look; and more than a few of them flickered irregularly).

They’d managed to make it a bit homier as the years went by, though.  Pieces of ratty, used furniture snagged from all over the system furnished the living quarters.  There was a unified speaker system to play music throughout the ship (though it was a bit old and the audio quality was scratchy).  They always had a stocked kitchen, even if it was often only stocked with meal replacement bars and full-day servings of nutrients that tasted like bland oatmeal and had the consistency of chalk.

But despite its spartan nature, it was still home.  The Airgead had been Wolf’s ship ever since the Lylat War ended.  It’d seen him through everything from the rise and fall of his small Sargasso empire to the Aparoid invasion and beyond, and he’d grown emotionally attached to it, objective piece of garbage though it may be.

Panther _hated_ it though, always had.  Wolf often wondered how a cat as uptight and pristine as Panther ended up with him in the first place, but whenever he broached the subject of his history the feline made up a new story.  Wolf’s favorite was the one about Panther falling in love with the daughter of a rival gang lord and being forced into exile.  Either that or the one about being forced to give up his dream of becoming a flamenco dancer and turning to crime as an outlet to release his suppressed rage.

As Wolf re-racked the bar and sat up, Panther handed him his water bottle.  Wolf accepted it with a grin.  “I thought you were tired of my laziness?”

“I was only heading you off before you had the chance to ask”, he explained with a haughty expression.  “Do not mistake my kindness for approval.”

Wolf hung his head and shook it, sniggering.  He took a swig of the drink and wiped his muzzle off with his free paw, leaning over the side of the bench with his arms propped on his legs.  “Well thanks, anyway.  Approval or otherwise.”

The feline nodded.  “You’re welcome.”  He paused for a beat.  “I take it you’ll be seeing McCloud again, soon?”

Wolf shrugged.  “Probably.”  _Hopefully_.  “We made plans to meet again.  That was before… you know, though.”

Panther raised a single eyebrow.  “You think he’ll change his mind just because he’s been outed?”

Wolf chewed on his lip.  He wasn’t sure how to answer Panther’s question; he’d asking himself the same thing all morning.  “Maybe.”

The feline put his paw to his muzzle, clearly in thought.  “I think you give him too little credit.  I don’t know McCloud well, but he’s never come across as the sort of man prone to changing his decisions based on snap-emotional reasoning.”

Wolf sighed and stared off into space.  Panther was right, he _knew_ he was, but…

“He still hasn’t messaged me yet.”

Panther gave a small shrug.  “It’s only been a day.”

“Yeah.”  Wolf nodded.  “Yeah, you’re right.”

Panther shot him an all-too-smug grin.  “Am I ever _not?_ ”

They were interrupted when Fay burst into the room, a wide smile plastered on her face.  “Cap’n!  I’ve got great news!”

Wolf rubbed his eyes.  “If this is more crap about that picture –”

“Nope!”  Her face contorted in thought.  “Well… _maybe_.  Not directly though.”

Wolf released a long-suffering sigh.  “Alright.  What is it?”

“ _Well_ ”, she began, putting her paws behind her back and drawing herself taller.  “I was right yesterday!  Star Wolf’s superiority over Star Fox must have been cemented by your devious maneuver, because Corneria just contacted us for a job!”

“Fay, I already told you, it wasn’t… wait.  _What?_ ”

“Yeah!”  She held up her comm-device.  “General Peppy is on the line.  He wants to speak with you!”

 

……….

 

“So, uh… That photo, huh?”

Fox grumbled something unintelligible that sounded vaguely like “I don’t want to talk about it”, head facedown on the counter and ensconced in his arms.

Falco sheepishly rubbed the back of his head, unsure of what to say.  He opened his beak, and slowly closed it again with an exhalation.  He settled on stuffing his hands in his pockets and standing there, determined to wait the vulpine out.

Said vulpine gave up with an exasperated sigh and lifted his head to face the avian head-on.  “What about it?”, he asked a bit too sullenly.

Falco scoffed at him.  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Fox.  I just want to talk.”  He paused, his eyes refusing to connect with Fox’s, staring off somewhere on the floor.  “ _Err_ … I mean, you don’t actually wear panties, do you?”

Fox groaned as Falco continued, “I mean, not that there’s anything _wrong_ with that.  Just don’t want to offend you if that’s the sort of thing you, you know… are into?”  His face contorted into a self-conscious grimace.  “Shit, I’m just making it worse, aren’t I?”

“No, Falco.  I don’t wear panties.”  He drummed his fingers on the desk.  “And I’m sorry for biting your head off.  You’re not making it worse, I’m just a little… Tense.”

Falco shot him a half-smile.  “Could’ve fooled me.”

“Yeah, yeah”, Fox responded with a soft smile of his own, before sighing.  “I’m just not sure what to do.  I haven’t even talked to Wolf yet.”

Fox went to bed the previous night in a remarkably good mood, mind drifting off to thoughts of a rough-yet-caring lupine holding him close.  He rose to a rude awakening that morning though: a worried text message from Krystal on his comm-device linking to a holostill doing the rounds over the extranet.

A holostill of a certain pair of canines with lips locked in a passionate embrace.

Fox continued to stew in his mortification as Falco’s face fell, slowly turning into something sharper, more dangerous.

The vulpine turned to look at him.  “What’s wrong?”

Falco distinctly looked like he didn’t want to talk about it.  “It’s nothing.”

Fox had heard that tone of voice from him before – it was never ‘nothing’.

“You can tell me anything, you know – right?”, he said carefully.

“Can I?”, Falco bit back.  “’Cause from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like the sentiment’s mutual.”

Fox’s ears fell back.  He _knew_ he should’ve told Falco and Slippy sooner.  But he kept putting it off, telling himself there was no rush, that there would be a better time.  He should’ve known life didn’t work that way – he should’ve done his friends better.

“I’m sorry.”

Falco turned from him with a huff.  It stung, but Fox also knew the bird was notoriously temperamental.  He’d come around at some point.

It was just that waiting for that point was hard.

“I should’ve told you guys about this months ago”, Fox continued.  “You deserved to know.  I really fucked up.”

“You bet you did.”  Falco’s expression evened out, but he still looked concerned.  “Dammit Fox, it’s not even that you’re gay that gets me.  Like shit, I always thought you were from the get-go.”

Fox looked surprised.  “Really?”

“Yeah”, Falco nodded.  “That’s why I was so floored when you got with Krystal.”  He folded his arms.  “I wish you felt like you could tell me though.”

The vulpine bowed his head.  “I meant to – I promise.  I just… kept putting it off.”

“I get it.  S’not your fault that dumb still went out.”  Upon mentioning it, Falco’s face grew testy again.  “… _That’s_ what’s really pissing me off here.”

Fox looked at him, making note of the anxious cast to his expression.  “That someone took a photo?”

“No, dammit!  Not the dumb fucking photo”, he exploded.  “ _Wolf!_ ”

Fox cocked his head.  “What’s wrong with Wolf?”

“’ _What’s wrong with’_ … _?_ ”  Falco let out a long, stressed-out groan, hands on his forehead sliding down his face and break.  “Come _on_ , Fox!  He’s fucking _Wolf!_   You know: your rival?  Andross’ ace pilot?  Teammate of your father’s killer?”, he rattled off, ignoring Fox’s nonplussed and amused expression.  “ _Total dickwad!?_ ”

Fox laughed.  “Falco, Wolf saved our lives.  Several times.”  He couldn’t believe _this_ of all things was the sticking point for the stubborn bird.  “We just worked alongside him literally a week ago.”

Falco groaned again, rubbing his head.  “Alright.  _Fine_.  You’re an adult; it’s your choice.”  He pointed a finger of warning at Fox.  “But when he breaks your heart, don’t come crying to me!”

“I’ll make sure not to”, Fox said with a calm smile, clearly not taking the bird too seriously.

Falco shook his head.  “I can’t believe you, sometimes.  This is probably _the_ dumbest thing, you’ve ever done, you know.”

Fox grinned.  “That’s not true and you damn well know it.”

Falco grumbled, arms folded, fully aware the vulpine was correct.  “Alright.  I’ve said my piece.”

“…We cool?”, Fox tentatively asked.

Falco walked away and exited the kitchen with a wave of his arm.  “Yeah, yeah – _whatever_.”

As the automatic door closed behind the avian with a hiss, Fox remained at the counter in solitude, coffee in hand and eyes refusing to focus on any one element of the room in particular.  He was starting to realize he was developing a bad habit here – or perhaps more accurately, he always had this habit and was only now noticing it.  Putting off talking to Wolf after their encounter on Zoness, putting off telling his closest friends about his personal life; and now putting off talking to Wolf _again_ after this stupid still started doing the rounds.  He glared at his coffee as if it were a hated nemesis, as if it was _its_ fault for keeping him from doing what he had to do.

He wondered how many people had seen the still at this point; if it had spread around to the extent that everyone he knew had looked at it.  His stomach dropped at the thought of Peppy seeing it.  The old hare was the closest thing he had to still-living family.  What would he think when (and it was ‘when’, not ‘if’) he saw it?  Fox locking lips with a man who’d worked alongside James’ killer?

It was the invasion of privacy that made Fox the angriest.  He’d shared an incredibly vulnerable day with Wolf, and the thought that some… random person would just, _take that_ , like it was nothing, and spread it around… He felt deeply betrayed.  He knew it was dumb to feel that way – it wasn’t like he knew the concierge or anything.  But he felt it all the same.  He couldn’t help but fixate on it, over and over and _over_ again.

What right did she have to his life?  What right did _any_ of the people who posted and reposted it across LylatNet, and WHEEL, and every other platform imaginable?

He should have known better than that; regardless of how he thought of himself, he was a very well-known figure in Lylat.  He wasn’t so oblivious or modest to think most people didn’t consider him a hero, and that many would be able to recognize him on sight.  In many respects he was like an unorthodox celebrity.  People looked up to him, and he felt he owed it to them to live up to their idealized image.

But that was the very sort of thinking that got him into this mess of self-denial in the first place.  How could he strike a balance?  He envied Wolf his nonchalance.  If he could just shrug everything off like him, he’d probably be a healthier canine for it.

…He wouldn’t really be true to himself if he did that, though.

His meandering thoughts were interrupted when the doors opened with another hiss, this time permitting Krystal entrance to the kitchen.  She looked at Fox first in surprise, and then with a knowing smile.

“If you glower at that coffee any harder, it might explode.”

He realized she was right: he was still staring daggers at the mug.  It was lukewarm by the time he took a sip – he’d been sitting there longer than he realized.

Krystal began working around the kitchen, presumably preparing herself lunch.  “Peppy commed me a little while ago”, she said as she opened the refrigerator door.  “Said he wanted to catch up; ‘talk shop’, as he put it.”

Fox grimaced into his drink.  There went the hope that he hadn’t seen the picture yet.

She turned to look at him, carton of milk in hand.  “You know he loves you dearly, right?  You’re practically a son to him.”

Fox leaned on the counter, face in paw.  “I know.  That doesn’t make this any easier.”

Krystal hummed in thought as she poured herself a glass.  “Good things in life are rarely easy to come by.”

He wiped his eyes with his paws in frustration.  “I’m just… really not looking forward to that conversation.”

“Which one?”, she asked.  “The one with Peppy, the one with Slippy, or the one with Wolf?  You have quite a few to catch up on.”

He groaned into his paws.

She grabbed one of his arms gently, moving it from his face.  “It’s alright, Fox”, she said with a hint of contained mirth.  “You’re making this a shade bit more dramatic than it is, don’t you think?”

He sat there limp as a noodle as Krystal held his arm aloft.  “Easy for you to say: you’re not the one whose intimate moment is being plastered all over the extranet for everyone to see.”

He cringed immediately after he said it.  _Dammit, Fox – trying to piss off everyone today?_

Krystal kept her expression measured, and on the surface it looked like nothing was different.  Fox caught the downbeat cast to her eyes though.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.  I wasn’t thinking.”

She shook her head.  “It’s alright.”  She smiled, but Fox noticed it was a bit forced – a bit melancholy.  “You’re right about one thing though: you _weren’t_ thinking.”

He smiled apologetically, a self-deprecating tint to the expression.  He _really_ didn’t want to open this can of worms on top of everything else, but he also needed to stop putting off difficult conversations.

“Krystal… When you were in my Arwing, coming back from the bedanti holdout…”

Now it was her turn to look uncomfortable.  She shook her head lightly.  “Let’s hash out the two of us _after_ you call Peppy back.  …And talk to Slippy.  And Wolf.”

He frowned at her.  “Are you sure you’re not the one putting off difficult talks, now?”

She smiled, and there was more energy behind it this time.  “Oh, I definitely am.”

Fox laughed, and she grinned along with the sound.

For at least one moment, it felt like everything was back to normal.

 

……….

 

Fox sat on the edge of his bed, comm-device in hand.

Krystal was right; the situation was serious, but he was making it even worse with the way he handled it.  The conversation with Slippy had been short and relaxed, the frog accepting his apologies, and even attempting to apologize himself for not somehow magically realizing.  Fox had shot that down – Slippy had a tendency to be over-apologetic, and he wasn’t going to let him be sorry for something that was his own fault.

He knew Slippy would be the easiest of the three conversations, though.  Now it was just a matter of deciding which of the more difficult calls he wanted to make first.

After thinking about it for a few moments, he settled on Wolf.  He drew up the lupine’s callsign and pressed it, holding the device to his ear and waiting for a response.

It took seven rings for him to finally pick up.

“What’s up?”, he asked over the line.  Even with the interference of lightyears’ worth of distance, his voice rang clear enough, the gritty tone of it causing Fox’s stomach to do a backflip.

“Just wanted to talk about some stuff.”

“Oh?  Is Foxy feeling _lonely?_ ”.

Fox scoffed, willfully ignoring Wolf’s obnoxious tone of voice.  “You wish.”  It was a lame comeback and he knew it.  “Listen, Wolf…”

“If this is about that dumb picture, I already saw it.  Minutes after I got back yesterday, actually.  Our little squirrely friend at the desk must have posted it right after we left – or hell, maybe while we were still there, even.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me…”

He trailed off, and the conversation went dead for a beat before Wolf picked it back up.  “Look, I’ll level with you: I don’t care.”

Fox’s ear twitched.  “What do you mean?”

“The holo-still, numbskull”, he rudely supplied.  “I don’t give two shits if everyone knows, or what they think.  I’m still interested in trying this out.  And if they want to be a dick about it, to me or you?  Fuck ‘em.”

Fox was glad Wolf wasn’t there to make fun of the rising color in his ears.  He’d already guessed Wolf wouldn’t care about the image, but to hear him say it out loud, and in such a way tailored around defending _Fox_ rather than being an extension of his typical ‘fuck-everything’ attitude…

“You still with me, Fox?”

“Yeah”, he responded.  “I’m just… touched, is all.”

Wolf let out a bark of laughter, and Fox felt the blush creep further upwards.  “If I had my way right now, you’d be touched in a lot more ways than that, pup.”

And further upwards still.

“Well, we _are_ going to be seeing each other in a week, right?”, Fox asked cautiously.

“Damn straight we are”, Wolf said, causing Fox to smile.  “I’ve… actually got business there soon, too.”

Fox was caught off-guard.  “What?  Really?”

Wolf’s let out a solitary laugh.  “Don’t sound so surprised.  But yeah, I do.  It’s a bit on the down-low though: I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“That’s good news.  Or at least I think it is?”  He thought about it for a moment.  “The fact you’re not supposed to tell anyone, though –”

“Oh, not just ‘anyone’”, he interrupted.  “You, specifically.”

Fox’s ears laid back.  “What?  Why?”

He got another laugh in response, this one more cryptic, and slightly threatening.  “Ask the old fuzzball if you want to know so bad.”

“…Peppy?”

“I’ve said too much”, he cut off curtly.  “We’re good for, let’s see – maybe this Thursday, at noon?  I’ll be on-planet then, in the capital.  I’ve got some free time.”

“Yeah”, Fox said a little cautiously.  “I’ll be there.”

“Good.  I’m looking forward to it.”  Wolf swallowed a sentence, as if he were about to say something but thought better of it.  “Catch you then, Fox.”

“Right, uh – you too?”

Wolf chuckled.  “Don’t sound so thrilled.”  And with that, the lupine hung up.

Fox continued to sit there for a few minutes, thinking about what to do next.  In a way, this was a bit of a blessing – he now had a reason to contact Peppy outside of the photo, which made it a little less awkward.  The fact he’d contacted _Wolf_ for a job instead of Fox, though… what was that about?

The vulpine almost rang the hare up then and there before he realized it was about 2 AM local time in the capital city.

Bereft of any immediate, pressing concerns, he kicked back and scrolled through the image album on his comm.  He’d taken a bunch of stills with Wolf out on their hike, and he couldn’t help but indulge in them here and now, reflecting on the memory like it was a distant, halcyon moment despite his only experiencing it the day before yesterday.

 _Damn it_ , he thought.

 _I’ve fallen for Wolf_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well here we are, with the fourth entry. This one's going to be more akin to Son of Titania, fair warning to anyone expecting a hefty focus on Fox/Wolf alone-time shenanigans.
> 
> Thanks fur kudos and comments, criticism welcome as always.


	3. Chapter 3

# II

 

The capital was every bit as ostentatious as he remembered: a veritable garden metropolis dominated by pristine skyscrapers whose mirrored glass reflected the hazy blue of the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon like an interlaced spiderweb dotted with crystalline nodes.

It was gorgeous; easily the grandest city in the entire system.

And Wolf couldn’t stand it.

He’d only been to the capital three times in his life.  The first when he was in Andross’ service before the war started, just to check it out for posterity’s sake.  The second when he saved the sorry asses of its citizens during the Aparoid invasion – and lastly when he came to get his official pardons after said conflict.

Every one of his trips reinforced the same thing to him: this was a _clean_ city.

Its pellucid spires were pristine to the point of sterility.  The air was clear of pollutants, and the people who walked through the hemisphere-spanning city’s copious parks and wildlands were hale and healthy.  There was very little poverty to speak of, and even the Cornerian ‘poor’ were better-off than the middle classes of most planets.  Safe streets, clear skies, every creature comfort available at the tip of your paws.

It was perfect – _too_ perfect.  And the worst part was that Wolf was starting to think it might actually be genuine.  When he was a brash young man (well, brash _er_ ), he weaved for himself elaborate fantasies about how all the literal and metaphorical hygiene of the city was a ruse: a ploy to cover its dark, demented heart.  It was the only way he could rationalize his upbringing on the crummy ball of dirt he called home while opulent utopias like this existed elsewhere.  He was the one who really had it good, he’d tell himself – all these people were fake, living a perpetual lie they fed themselves every day.

But as he aged, he began to realize that what he saw was what he got:  Corneria was just a wonderful planet.

Somehow that made it even worse.

Before, he could blame them for his dad, his brother, for Alarbus – for _everything_.  The city’s perfection was a personal slight against him and others just like him.  But the fact that it was nothing more or less than luck of the draw that dealt him his hand of cards?  That stung.  Now who could he blame for his shitty life?

As it turned out, no one.

He had this epiphany after the Lylat War, and it changed the entire trajectory of his life.  He was his own master.  Not Andross, not his father, not his past: _him_.  His life was whatever he wanted to make of it, and by damn, he would force it to go the way he wanted.  No kings or gods but his own desire – his own will to power.  That philosophy saw him rise from the disgraced former stooge of a dead warlord he was into the uncontested kingpin of piracy in the greater Sargasso region.

He still had trouble reconciling that past with where he was now:  in Corneria’s capital, sitting peacefully at the window seat of a corner café, waiting for Fox-fucking-McCloud of all people to show up, and about to undertake a mission on behalf of the Cornerian Navy.

Maybe there really was a God, and they had a twisted sense of humor.

He closed his eye and took a deep breath through his nose, taking in the pleasant scents and notable odors of the café.  _Mediocre coffee in his right paw, still hot courtesy of the unique, highly conductive metal-infused ceramic.  Family of iguanas at the table behind him, harder to detect since they were cold-blooded.  The nervous cervine server, pheromones spiking whenever he looked at the doe seated at a table off to his left in the middle of the room._

_Familiar vulpine entering through the front door._

Wolf opened his eye with a squint, and grinned.  Fox warily looked around the establishment for a few seconds before his gaze found him by the window, and he perked up at the discovery.

 _Vulpine pheromones: combination of nervousness and attraction_.

Wolf didn’t even bother sitting up, opting instead to lean back into the booth, feeling heady at the approaching scent.  If only Fox knew how much it drove him crazy.

Maybe it was better that he didn’t, actually.

“This is nice”, the vulpine said as he sidled into the seat across from Wolf.  “Not as nice as _my_ choice, though.”

“That a joke, pup?”  Wolf chuckled.  “This place is crap; I only picked it cause it’s easy to get to.”

Of course the server chose just that moment to come by to take their order, overhearing his comment.  Wolf shot him his greasiest grin.  “I’ll take a club sandwich”, he ordered before the server even had a chance to say anything.

Fox glared at him, and Wolf almost laughed at the indignance in the vulpine’s eyes.

“May I take your order?”, the buck asked Fox politely but pointedly.

“Yes – I’ll just have a club, myself.  Thank you.”  He said with a genuine smile on his face, and the server reciprocated, any sign of annoyance with Wolf evaporating away like a puddle under the Titanian sun.

As their waiter departed, Wolf looked at Fox with a twinkle in his eye.

“What?”, Fox demanded.

“You’re just a good guy, is all.”

Wolf took note of the reddish tint to the vulpine’s ears.  “Being polite to waitstaff isn’t being ‘good’ – it’s basic decency.  Something you could stand to learn, eventually.”

Fox looked at him with such earnestness when he said it that Wolf couldn’t help but start to laugh.  “I know plenty about basic decency, trust me”, he said with a devilish smile.  “I just don’t care enough to bother with it.”

Fox actually _huffed_ at that.  “That makes it even worse.”

Wolf shook his head.  “Anyway”, he forcibly changed the subject, “You talk to General Fluff, yet?”

The vulpine’s eyes flicked away for a second, which was all the answer Wolf needed.

“No, not yet.  I almost called him, but thought it would be better to come in person.”

Wolf nodded.  “Makes sense.  Might be a bit awkward, though, what with me going to meet him today too.”

Fox’s eyes lit up with interest, just as he knew they would.  “Why _are_ you meeting with him, anyway?”

Wolf smiled and raised his paws in a placating gesture.  “Sorry, Fox.  I’m not supposed to tell you – I’m beholden to my word.”  His eye took on a glint of mischief.  “Wouldn’t be ‘basic decency’ for me to go around telling secrets, now would it?”

The vulpine groaned: music to Wolf’s ears.  He liked to have fun with Fox.

“Look, just come along with me and talk with him then.  He won’t _not_ tell you if you ask him to his face.”

Wolf could see Fox weighing his options in his eyes.  “I don’t know… I don’t want to make him divulge state secrets to me just because I’m worried.”

Now _that_ wasn’t what he’d expected.  “Worried?”

“Yeah”, Fox said with a tone that suggested it was the most obvious thing in the world.  “I mean, Cornerian Navy missions tend to get… rough, sometimes.  And the thought of you doing one alone is…”

Wolf sat there and stared at the vulpine for a good long while, taking in his expression, his scent – everything about him.  Not for the first time he realized he was starting to think of him as _his_ fox.

“You okay, Wolf?”

Was he okay?  No, definitely not; he’d developed feelings for a fellow merc, one with a squeaky-clean background who he might drag down into the muck with him.

“Never been better”, he said instead, disarming Fox’s worries before they had a chance to mobilize.

The vulpine shot him a shy smile of his own, and Wolf was torn in two.

What right did he have to someone as good as Fox?

 

……….

 

The Oberon Spire, the central hub of center-city, was even more dominating from the ground than the sky.  Fox had to tilt his head almost ninety degrees to see the top of it; and even then, a passing cloudbank obscured its zenith from view.

Lunch had gone decently, all things considered.  Fox was dying to know the details behind Wolf’s mission, and yet simultaneously dreading to face the person responsible for organizing it.  The fact that Peppy trusted Wolf enough to reach out to him for contract-work was inspiring some modicum of hope, but Fox still felt like he was going to get chewed out for sleeping with the enemy.

“Hey”, Wolf said with a slap on his back.  “Stop panicking.  You’re giving _me_ an anxiety attack just looking at you.”

Fox frowned.  “Sorry.  I’m not doing it on purpose.”

The lupine shrugged.  “Didn’t think you were.  Doesn’t stop it from making me jittery though.”

Fox nodded and they continued towards the building, making their way up the large, shallow staircase towards the main entrance.

The Spire’s mammoth mezzanine of a primary entrance hall always made Fox’s head spin when he first got inside; the first thirty or so floors opened up directly into this monumental space, layered over top of each other in such a way that the interior formed a sort of hollow ‘pyramid’, with the open air courtyard in the center of each floor getting smaller with each successive level until you reached the top.

Well, ‘top’ of the mezzanine anyway – Fox knew there were another thousand-odd floors above what he could see from the entrance hall.

Judging from Wolf’s expression, he guessed the lupine was a little out of sorts himself.  Wolf must have known Fox was looking at him somehow, because he turned to face him with a questioning look on his face.

“How did they even build this thing?”

Fox smiled.  “With starships.”

“Figures”, Wolf scoffed.

They deftly walked through the constantly moving crowd of aids and messengers flitting to and fro and approached the main lobby desk.  The eyes of the homely orangutan manning it widened at their approach.

“Ah!  Mr. O’Donnell – General Pepper is waiting for you!”, he said with a tone that sounded a mite too fearful for Fox’s liking.  Did he really think Wolf was dangerous?

Wolf cocked an eyebrow.  “Yeah.  I know.”

Fox elbowed him for his rudeness, and the lupine grinned in response.

The orangutan either didn’t notice Wolf’s tone, didn’t care, or was too scared to question it.  “I’ll let his secretary you’re on your way…”  He petered off and looked at Fox questioningly.   “ _Uh_ … Mr.McCloud, are you… with him?”

Fox nodded before he considered the potential ramifications of the ape’s question.  He’d managed to forget half the system had probably already seen the accursed holo-still by this point over lunch.

“Alright – take the elevator over to your left; sixty-sixth floor.”

Fox was saying his thanks and on his way before his mind caught up with him.  “Wait – not the middle floor?  Peppy’s office is up there.”

The ape nodded his head, then shook it.  “Yes.  I mean, no.  Well: I mean, his _office_ is there, but he’s meeting you at –”

“Thanks for the help”, Wolf shot off curtly before the ape had a chance to continue stammering.  Fox apologized for their lack of tact and went after him.

He had to quicken his pace to keep up the lupine.  “It’s really unusual for Peppy to not meet people in his office – what exactly does he have you doing?”

Wolf chuckled.  “Can’t wait a few minutes to find out?  Impatient: that’s what that is.”

They entered the elevator and told the tired-looking avian attendant that they wanted the sixty-sixth floor, and he punched in it for them with a nod and a noncommittal sound that Fox guessed was an affirmative.

Placing military officials in charge of elevator access was something General Pepper came up with as a preventative security measure early on in the Lylat War.  On one hand, it all but denuded the risk of anyone sneaking into off-limits locations.  On the other, it meant there was a sizable number of people in the Cornerian Navy who went through all the trials and tribulations of military education only to end up ferrying people up and down elevators all day.  Ending up as an ‘elevator jockey’ was always the worst-case scenario people talked about in the Academy.

The canines stood side-by-side as the elevator slowly ascended.  Fox was somewhat confused by Peppy’s decision to meet them at a lower floor, but also thankful for it.  He’d made the full elevator journey to the very top only once, back in Pepper’s day; he was glad he didn’t have to undergo the three-hour expedition again.

Not least because Wolf wouldn’t stop fidgeting.  Perhaps the lupine was more nervous than he let on.  About a mission, though?  Fox couldn’t believe something as low-key as that would get to him, Corneria’s involvement be damned.  There had to be something else eating at him.

But what?

“We’ve arrived”, their aquiline attendant announced with an air of absolute boredom.  The doors of the elevator opened onto an unassuming hallway lined with offices.  Wolf departed without so much as a ‘thanks’ or even a backward glance, and once again Fox had to pick up the slack.

As they walked down the hall, Fox turned to talk to him.

“You don’t have to be so rude to the workers here, you know.”

Wolf grunted and said nothing.

Fox frowned to himself at that display.  “Are you okay?”  He really meant the question, too; Wolf was being unusually standoffish, even by the lupine’s own, lacking standards of social decorum.

“Never been better”, he responded with a carefully neutral expression.

Fox didn’t buy that for a second, but also knew not to push any further – Wolf would tell him what was wrong when he was ready.

Or at least he hoped he would.

“Anyway, do you know where we’re going?”  The two of them had passed a number of bland-looking offices, and Fox was beginning to think Wolf was just winging it.

“Fuzzball told me to head to the end of the hall when he rang me up.”  He chewed on the side of his lip.  “You don’t know, though?”

Fox shook his head.  “I’ve been in the Spire plenty of times, but I doubt anyone’s actually been on every single floor.”  He glanced to the side, making note of another office as they passed.  There was something off about it all, but he couldn’t quite place his finger on what.

After another moment of silence between the two, it finally clicked.

“They’re empty.”

Wolf turned to him with a confused frown.  “What?”

“The offices”.  They passed another, and Fox was sure of it.  “They’re all empty – no one’s inside them.”  As he continued to walk, he perked his ears up, listening for a sound, any sound at all.  “In fact, I don’t think there’s anyone on this whole floor.”

Wolf’s eyes narrowed.  Fox always found that expression strangely haunting, the brow around his cybernetic implant furrowing as equally as that of his biological eye.

“I think you’re right.”

“You can’t tell with your implant?”

Wolf shook his head.  “I haven’t been able to see anything with it since we got inside.  There must be bafflegear stocked into every ounce of this place.”

Fox nodded his understanding.  “Slippy told me once that the Spire has all sorts of hidden security features.”

The lupine hummed thoughtfully in response, but said nothing else.

They finally reached the end of the hallway, only to be met with a blank wall.

“Dead end”, Fox unhelpfully supplied.

Wolf stood there with his paw to his chin in thought for a moment, glancing at the wall from this angle and that, crouching down to inspect the seam where it met the floor.

The both of them jumped in surprise as the wall suddenly slid aside to reveal a bemused-looking, bespectacled rabbit.

“Sorry about all the secrecy”, Peppy said with more than a hint of humor.  “It’s a precaution we have to take these days.”

Wolf grunted, but Fox smiled.  He was overcome with a complex tableau of emotions.  Joy at seeing Peppy again, haler and happier-looking than he was the last time they met; uneasiness at the fact the rabbit doubtless knew of his budding relationship with Wolf; and a bit of worry over that comment of his.

“It’s good to see you again, Peppy.”  He extended his paw and the rabbit grasped it with his own before pulling the vulpine in for a sudden half-hug.  Fox was shocked at first, but reciprocated with one of his own when the old hare gave his back a sturdy pat.  He could hear Wolf sniggering behind him.

Peppy let him go and looked him straight in the eyes, his paws on both of Fox’s shoulders.  “You too, Fox.”  And Fox saw no judgment or anger in those eyes: only the good-natured, humorous twinkle they always carried.  He smiled more earnestly then.

Peppy had accepted him without a single word passing between them.  It was such a relief that Fox felt as if the weight of an entire planet had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Okay, cut this out before I hurl over here.”

Fox turned to see Wolf watching with arms folded, an enigmatic expression fixed somewhere between a genuine smile and a pained grimace on his face.  Fox chuckled a bit embarrassedly and let Peppy go.

The hare turned to face Wolf and extended his paw towards him.  “Wolf”, he said with a tone of ambivalent tolerance, if not outright approval.

The lupine stared at it like it was going to bite before stretching out his own paw and shaking Peppy’s with perhaps too strong of a grip.  “General Hare.”

At least he wasn’t being rude to Peppy, Fox thought with relief.

As they broke the handshake, Peppy put his paws behind his back.  “Well, I think pleasantries can wait a bit.  For now, we have a mission to discuss.”  He glanced at Fox.  “I don’t recall requesting the presence of a representative from Star Fox for this, though”, he said with the jovial, conflicted tone of a parent who caught their child doing something they weren’t supposed to but which they found amusing and couldn’t totally disapprove of.

Peppy laughed as Fox’s ears wilted.  “It’s fine, Fox.  You can tag along too – I trust you.  Now,” he half-turned to the side and indicated towards the hallway behind him.  “We have business to discuss.”

 

……….

 

Wolf wasn’t happy about going on yet _another_ elevator trip – luckily, this one moved a lot faster.

 _Too_ fast, almost.

He had to brace himself against the side of the elevator as it dropped into what felt like freefall.  Fox had jumped in surprise when the compartment began to lurch and grabbed onto Wolf’s arm for dear life.  Peppy just watched them with a mischievous glint in his eyes, seemingly unaffected by the rapid motion of the elevator around them.

“You get used to it after the first few times”, he supplied.  “It’s never a fun ride, but if it didn’t go faster, we’d be standing here for a while.”

Wolf grumbled at that.  “Where are we even going, anyway?”  Fox nudged him in the side for what felt like the hundredth time that morning.  The vulpine usually put up with his standoffishness, but apparently being disrespectful to the Cornerian government was the limit.

That chafed against his sense of pride a bit, and now he was doing it on purpose just to make a point to Fox.

Wolf really could be a little snot when he wanted to.

“Lylat Central Intelligence”, Peppy answered.  “Their offices are quartered quite a bit underground.”

Wolf’s brow furrowed.  “You didn’t say anything about this mission involving spooks over the comm.”

The old hare chuckled.  Wolf hated how warm and fatherly it sounded, and he hated that the only reason he hated it was because Peppy occupied an important part in Fox’s life and Wolf was jealous of anyone the vulpine was closer to than himself.

“It’d be bad policy to go around talking about the LCI’s business over public comm channels, don’t you think?”

Wolf made a noncommittal noise, and Fox spoke up.  “Peppy, if you don’t mind my asking…”

The rabbit raised his paws.  “Hold your horses, Fox.  It’d be pointless for me to explain everything only to have Captain Hugin explain it all over again.”

“You’re letting me in the briefing?”, Fox asked with a hopeful glint that made Wolf’s own mood brighten a tad just by looking at it, though he’d never admit as much.

Peppy nodded.  “I see no reason why not, now that you’re here.  Hugin will probably be irritated by someone sitting around who isn’t directly involved – but he’s always irritated by everything anyways.”

Wolf folded his arms.  “Who is this ‘Hugin’ guy?”

Peppy readjusted his glasses.  “Director of the LCI.  That’s a classified state secret by the way, so you’re not allowed to tell anyone.”

The lupine bristled.  He didn’t like being told what he could or could not say, especially by uptight, pompous, overbearing, steadfast, pleasant, well-meaning –

He lost track of his train of thought there.

The elevator landed, interrupting his meandering thoughts.  The fact it didn’t crash into the floor and kill the three of them felt like a miracle, considering how fast it moved during the trip down.

They exited and walked into a sort of complex that Wolf thought could use more interior lighting.  It was dark as pitch in the corners, and the only light came from regularly placed blue-tinted glowstrips along the corners of the ceiling and floors.

“You ever hold raves down here?”, he asked half to keep himself even, daunted as he was by being shunted off into the literal deepest, darkest secret heart of Corneria.

Peppy didn’t even deign that with a response, opting instead to eyeball Wolf with a look that clearly said he wasn’t going to put up with the lupine’s bullshit if he kept serving it.  Wolf answered with a challenging glance of his own, prompting the rabbit to turn away with a roll of his eyes.

“Peppy, how _big_ is this place?”, Fox asked, as they passed numerous hallways branching out into different directions.

“Not as big as it looks.  It extends to the width of the Spire’s base floor, I believe.”

They reached an unassuming door with no visible way to open, made of the same night-dark alloy as the rest of the complex.  Peppy touched a scanner to the side of the door with is paw, and it lit up in response with an ice-blue light that pulsated for a moment before permitting them entry.

Wolf shielded his biological eye with his paw as he entered, near-blinded by how bright it was in comparison with the external hallway: that is to say, it was dimly-lit by hanging fluorescent lamps.

A raccoon with noticeable bags under his eyes (a rare feat for his species, Wolf thought) lazily turned to face them from his seat as they entered, a careless half-smile on his face.  “General Pepper”, he greeted the rabbit with a nod before taking a sip from his drink.  Wolf couldn’t tell what it was from the scent, but he could tell it smelled bitter.

“Nice to see you again”, the rabbit greeted back.  “Fox, Wolf; this is Agent Rentador.  He’s the one responsible for organizing this whole shebang.”

The raccoon chuckled.  “Well, I wouldn’t go _that_ far.  It’s a group effort.”  He took in both of the canines with a look Wolf instantly pinned as intentionally congenial.  Wolf was a master of masks, and he could spot a guise from several clicks away.

The real trick was finding out what the façade was hiding.

“It’s an honor to meet the legendary Fox McCloud”, the raccoon said as he rose from his seat and approached the eponymous hero.  Fox, bless him, didn’t notice anything measured about the agent’s expression and shook his paw with the same golden-boy grin he gave everyone.  “Likewise.”

When the agent turned to give Wolf the same treatment, the lupine gave him an icy stare.  The raccoon didn’t balk, though, maintaining his smile despite the cold gaze.  Wolf had to give him credit, not many could withstand the full force of his ‘dangerous pirate’ glare without buckling at least a little.

“And the less-legendary but still renowned Wolf O’Donnell.”  Rentador extended his paw, and Wolf grasped it.  The agent shot Wolf an acerbic grin of his own – and _this_ one Wolf could decipher.  The agent knew full-well Wolf knew he was wearing a mask, and he thought it was _funny_.

“Glad to know I’m at least ‘renowned’.  I’d have thought the LCI would consider me ‘infamous’”.  Wolf could see Fox frowning again, annoyed with his pathological need to push buttons at every turn.

But the raccoon only laughed.  “Maybe when you were working with Andross, but not afterwards.”  Rentador grinned.  “Even when you were still running Sargasso, it was never important enough for us to consider something to worry about.  We leave the small fry be – it’s the bigger fish we’re after.”

There was no point in making that comment other than delivering a blow to Wolf’s sense of personal pride, and the raccoon damn well knew it.

 _Prick_.

“Speaking of ‘bigger fish’”, Peppy interrupted before the low-key struggle for dominance between the two could escalate, “The mission?”

The agent nodded.  “Of course.  We’re just waiting for Hugin to arrive so we can – Oh, speak of the devil!”

Wolf turned to see an uptight-looking raven enter through the door opposite, flanked by a pair of what he assumed were additional LCI agents.

The raven’s gaze settled on each of them in turn, and he nodded pleasantly to them, if with a hint of reservation.  “Mr. McCloud, Mr. O’Donnell: my name is Captain Hugin.  You’re not familiar with me, but I’m sure you’re familiar with my work.”

Fox approached him and stated his pleasantries, shaking his hand, while Wolf stood off to the side, arms folded and with a scowl plastered on his face.  When Hugin turned to face him, the lupine made no move to shake his hand.  The avian frowned at that, but didn’t press any further.

“Now”, he announced to the room, “let’s discuss the proposal, shall we?”

They shuffled into seats scattered along the edges of the conference table.  Wolf was taken aback for a moment at how shoddy everything was: the table was old and covered with stains and scratches, and the chairs were akin to something Wolf would furnish the Airgead with.  The single lamp hanging over the table made the vibe not dissimilar to sitting in on a game of poker back at Sargasso Station – the only difference being the walls plastered with corkboards displaying evidence for various operations rather than band posters and pinups.

Well, that and the company.

“First off, I want to apologize for the inconvenience our additional secrecy measures may have caused”, Hugin stated in a controlled tone of voice.  “Trust that it was for a very good reason.”

Fox nodded from his seat to Wolf’s left, but the lupine frowned.  “And what reason is that?”

That obnoxiously smug raccoon answered.  “We’re not at liberty to say”.  Wolf could’ve sworn he got a kick out of shutting him down.

“And how am I supposed to trust someone who won’t trust _me?_ ”, Wolf demanded.

Hugin’s eyes narrowed and he looked like he was about to fire off something of his own before Peppy intervened, blasted conciliator that he was.

“We do trust you, Wolf”, the rabbit said.  “And you too, Fox.  It’s just… we have a bit of a situation going on in the Spire.  Nothing major, mind you”, he said to assuage Fox’s visible surprise before the vulpine got ready for action, “but major enough for us to reroute traffic to important floors through secret elevators.”

Wolf barked out a laugh.  “That sounds pretty major to me.”

Fox, to his side, looked like he agreed with the lupine for the first time that morning.  “I’m with Wolf on this one: what’s up?  Is there anything we can do to help?”

The room went silent as Peppy and Hugin made eye contact, an unspoken conversation playing out between their eyes.  Wolf guessed the raven relented in the end, dropping his gaze to the conference table with a beleaguered sigh.

Peppy turned to face the pair of canines.  “We had a security breach a few days ago: someone made it past security and snuck into the Spire.”  He frowned, a distinct look of discomfort on his face.  “…We haven’t found them, yet.”

Wolf balked.  “You mean there’s an intruder?  _Still in here?_   I thought you guys had the best security in the system; what the hell, man.”  Fox’s brow shot up at his vulgarity, but Wolf found he honestly didn’t care.  How could Corneria be so careless as to let something like that happen?  And how was it even possible they wouldn’t have gotten them yet?

“We do”, Hugin responded with a bite.  “Which is why this is a ‘situation’.”  He looked at Peppy with barely-contained vexation.  “We know for a fact they haven’t escaped yet, and any and all transmissions outside of the Spire are being monitored constantly.  We _will_ find them soon enough.”  He visibly forced himself to relax somewhat.  “This isn’t pertinent to why you’re here though; we’re getting side-tracked.”

“You’re right”, Peppy responded.  “Agent Rentador, care to explain?  Wolf knows some of the details already, but Fox doesn’t.”

The rabbit nodded to the vulpine, and Wolf wondered how annoyed Hugin was that he had to humor explaining a mission to someone who wasn’t even involved with it.

He hoped it was ‘extremely’.

“It’d be my pleasure.”  The raccoon fished a projector out of his pocket and placed it on the table.  He brought up a holographic image of a planet densely covered with thick, wispy white, with only the smallest shards of blue peaking out from beneath the dense blanket of clouds.

“For the last several years, the LCI has been working to infiltrate, subvert and break apart the Enclave.”  He turned to face Fox.  “Since you’re probably not familiar with it: the Enclave is a council of some of the most powerful criminal organizations in Lylat.  They meet at irregular summits to coordinate their illicit businesses with each other to achieve maximum efficiency and security.”

Fox nodded, and Rentador continued.  “The LCI cultivated one Fazanh Tertulli for use as an inside man in the Enclave, with the intent that he could bring them down from within.  But due to his demise on Titania at the paws of his own steward, that avenue’s closed to us.”

Fox looked sheepish at that, and Wolf’s sense of defensiveness kicked in.  There was no way Fox could be held culpable for that shit-festival on Titania.  He hoped none of these asshats would blame him, for their own sake.

“However”, the raccoon went on, “the LCI’s plan to bring down the Enclave continues despite his absence; we’ve just had to… _improvise_ a bit.”

A series of glowing, red dots popped up across the image of the planet like radioactive acne.

“Each of these points represents a team of agents already on the ground on Fichina.  Thanks to what limited information we could gleam from Tertulli’s correspondence with the Enclave, we know they’re meeting in a week’s time – which means the heads of every syndicate worth its salt is on-planet, right now.”  He paused for effect.  “I’m sure you appreciate how much of an opportunity this is for Corneria.”

Wolf grunted.  “Kill a flock of birds with one stone.”  He saw Hugin scowl at his choice of phrase, and grinned – he was hoping it’d piss him off.

“Precisely”, the agent continued unphased.  “We usually prefer to operate a bit more elegantly than this, but this is an opportunity we can’t afford to squander.  Hypothetically, we could hobble most of the organized crime in Lylat with one op.  It’d be irresponsible _not_ to act.”

“But we hit a snag”, Peppy stated.

“What kind of snag?”, Wolf asked.

Rentador frowned and brought up a holo-still of a dour-looking lion with a gray mane.

“This is Nikolai Volskov: patriarch of the Volskov Crime Family.  He’s the head honcho of the Fichina Families as a whole… and therefore de facto ‘leader’ of the Enclave.”  The agent turned away from the still to make eye contact with Wolf.  “He’s been killed.”

Wolf struggled to not outwardly react to that bit of news.  He may have never personally done business with the Volskovs, but it was impossible to work in the underworld and _not_ hear their name on a regular basis.  Nikolai Volskov was the closest thing the Lylat underworld had to a singular person of power.  Wolf didn’t even want to think about the amount of chaos that must be going on in his formerly-frequented circles.

“When did this happen?”, he asked quietly.

“Right before I contacted you”, Peppy answered.  “In fact, it’s _why_ I contacted you.”

Wolf grimaced.  The rabbit told him they needed his help for an information-gathering operation on Fichina, but he hadn’t said anything about this assassination.

Hugin spoke up.  “We want to know who killed Volskov, and why.  The last thing we need in a mission with so many variables already – a mission of such comparative magnitude and import – is another party entering the situation and risking everything we’ve worked towards.”

“Why?”, Wolf bit out.

“…‘Why’, what?”, the raven responded.

“Why any of this?”  Wolf leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.  Fox shot him a look of warning, but he ignored it.  “So Volskov got offed – big deal.  Why not go on with your operation as planned, anyway?  Why get me and my own involved to investigate the murder of someone you were already planning to toss in a cell?  Why not have one of your own people investigate it, if you care so much?”  He paused for a beat, and tried to stare down the raven to his best of his ability.  “Unless there’s something here you’re not telling me?  Something that’ll make this make sense?”

Hugin glowered at him.  “If you would let us finish, I think things will become much clearer.”  Wolf held his tongue, and the avian heaved a sigh, signaling to Rentador to continue.

The raccoon looked a bit worried at their exchange (the first real emotion Wolf saw from him as of yet), but did as he was bidden.

“We received an encrypted communique from someone deeply embedded in the Families.  Not one of our own agents, mind you, but a bona fide high-profile individual working within the Enclave.  We’ve confirmed the veracity of the communique – it’s legitimate.”

Rentador conjured up an image of the message.

“They claim to know who killed Volskov, and also claim the killer plans to act again.  According to them, the killer is an aggressive third party attempting to subvert the Enclave for their own purposes.” 

Rentador closed up the holo-images and re-pocketed the projector.  “If this is true, it could impede or possibly even ruin our operation.  We can’t arrest the members of the Enclave and shut down their operations if they scatter.”

“Or if there aren’t any members to arrest”, Wolf added.

Fox rubbed his muzzle with his paw in thought.  “But who’s the tattletale?  And who’s the killer?”

Peppy and Hugin made eye contact, and this time Hugin seemed more than willing to let Peppy drop the bad news.  “We don’t know – on either count.  They refuse to tell us until we meet them and promise them legal impunity from the Lylat justice system.”

Wolf laughed.  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.  That’s asinine!  They could be lying, making it up.  It could be a trap for all you know.”

“Which is why we’re offering you the job instead of sending one of my own agents”, Hugin supplied coolly.

Wolf’s ears dropped back and he let out a low growl, earning a look of shock from the avian.  “Star Wolf’s _expendable_ , huh?”

He thought for sure Fox would react with horror to his latest rude display, but the vulpine only looked to be in disbelief – not at Wolf’s actions, but at Hugin’s pronouncement.  “That’s callous.”

Wolf’s ears perked back up at Fox’s statement.  The vulpine’s keen sense of justice was kicking in, it looked like.  Wolf couldn’t decide if he felt more embarrassed by someone having to stand up for him, or proud that someone as unequivocally good as Fox was taking his side.

Peppy watched the back-and-forth with a glare of his own directed at the raven.  “That is _not_ what we discussed, Hugin.”  He turned to look at Wolf with a genuinely apologetic expression.  “I can’t speak for the director, but as far as I’m concerned, I offered you the job for a few reasons.”  He shot Hugin another disappointed look before reconnecting with Wolf.

“For one, the LCI’s already stretched thin as it is.  Hugin’s putting on a bit of a show for you here, but the organization’s straining something hard to pull off this operation.”

The raven stared daggers at Peppy, but didn’t contradict him.

“For another, your presence on-planet might open some doors an agent couldn’t.  You have a rep in the underworld that gives you clout in certain areas – we don’t currently have any agents that could pull something like that off.”

“Anymore, now that Agent Gerald’s identity is compromised”, Hugin directed at Fox with poorly-hidden contempt.  The vulpine’s ears grew hot for a split-second before wilting.

It was official: Wolf _hated_ Hugin.

“Lastly – and this _is_ a bit ‘callous’, as Fox put it, but it’s true – you offer us plausible deniability.  If, God forbid, you get caught, no one can say for certain that you were working on behalf of Corneria.”

Wolf continued to lean back in the chair, tipping it onto its hind legs with his feet and rocking it backwards.  He was putting on as much of a show as Hugin, he knew – if he wasn’t planning on accepting this gig, he never would’ve showed up in the first place.  Corneria’s payrate was just too good to turn down.

He sighed.  “When do I start?”

 

……….

 

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

Wolf chuckled at Fox’s palpable worry.  The vulpine was too good for his _own_ good.

“No, but I want to, and I can pretty much guarantee Panther and Fay will feel the same when I clue them in on the details.”

He turned to see Fox frowning at him, his expression one of profound concern.

Wolf sighed.  “Listen”, he said as he put his paws on the smaller canine’s shoulders.  “It’s a dangerous mission, yeah – but dangerous missions are what I do.  Hell, they’re what _you_ do.  If you’re going to be worrying yourself over my safety like this, then you’re going to be worrying constantly.”

 _Yet another reason to end this before I break him_ , Wolf thought before he could stop himself.

Fox responded with a gentle sigh of his own and put his right paw on top of Wolf’s.  “I’m not worried about you regarding the mission – I’m worried about you in general.”

Wolf frowned.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

Fox shook his head.  “Never mind; some other time.”  The vulpine forced an awkward smile on his face.  “I know you’ll do fine.  You don’t need to be thinking about this when you’re working.”

If Fox could’ve said one thing to guarantee he’d be thinking about ‘this’ non-stop, it was that.  But Wolf didn’t say so – clearly something was eating at the vulpine, and he didn’t need to add more baggage onto it.

 _Especially since you’ve already added enough just by saddling yourself to him_.

Wolf put on a fake smile of his own, one that was tender enough that he hoped Fox wouldn’t notice its ersatz nature.  “I’ll be back before you know it.”

He made sure no one could see them in their position, hidden in an alcove in the alley right outside the hangar where Wolf parked his Wolfen, and leaned in for a kiss.  Fox responded eagerly.

But Wolf’s mind was elsewhere as they embraced.

It was inside of a crummy, downbeat homestead on a broken planet, reeking of liquor and smarting of bruises.  It was off to the side of a podium atop a ziggurat overlooking a throng of fawning soldiers, as a madman with his back to him bellowed curses into the evening sky, arms gesticulating wildly, as the crowd reveled in his words.  It was looking over a hangar full of contraband goods and staffed with the scum of the system as the crimson glow of the nearby planet filled his vision.  It was in the heart of a chittering, creaking, clicking nest of claws and wings and eyes within eyes within eyes and glistening violet shells that filled in the edges of his nightmares like a stalking shadow he could never escape.

It was in a dark alley much like this on another planet.

Wolf broke the kiss gently, and looked at Fox in a way he never quite did before.  The vulpine’s emerald eyes searching his own, beseeching him for something he couldn’t place.  His burnished orange-gold fur rustling from a wayward draft of air that smelled much cleaner than any city’s air had the right to be.

Wolf raised his paw to Fox’s face, cupping the side of it, and Fox absentmindedly nuzzled into the touch.  Wolf wanted to memorize every contour of him, every shift and curve in his shape.

Because he had the strangest sense he’d never get another chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm guesstimating this story will be about the same length as Son of Titania, but with fewer, longer chapters (since there are less plot threads to juggle between).
> 
> Thanks for kudos and comments, criticism welcome as always.


	4. Chapter 4

# III

 

Wolf didn’t mind the darkness.

Even prior to attaining his cybernetic eye and its ability to see in wavelengths biological eyes never could, he had excellent night vision thanks to his canine heritage.  Nighttime had always been something of a respite for him growing up – the one time of day his father and brother were guaranteed to be out of commission, and therefore not beating each other.

Or him.

That sense of peace afforded him by the setting of the sun had continued throughout the rest of his life, well into adulthood.  When the trials of the day grew too worrisome, he’d occasionally retreat into the dark, where he could be alone and at peace.

It was how he found himself at this very moment – reclined in a ratty, old down-cushioned chair in his quarters aboard the Airgead, with the door shut, the window-covers sealed, and the lights off.  He absently swirled a glass of something in his paw.  He wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was, as the bottle had no label and his sense of smell only told him it was pretty high-proof.

The other paw held a cigarette which he’d occasionally lift to his lips between sips of the almost medicinally alcoholic drink, its red cinder-glow smoldering as he inhaled and wilting away as he let his breath go like a languid heartbeat, the fading, metronomic pulse of its embers the only source of light in the room.

Wolf figured they must be nearing Fichina soon.  They’d entered the warp gate a few hours ago, and he’d left Panther and Fay alone on the bridge under the pretense of grabbing some shuteye.

He absently wondered if either of them had done what he told them he was going to do; the more rested they were, the better off they’d be on this mission.

Not that he could judge, really; not with him spending his last few hours of comparative peace stewing in the toxic sludge of his own psyche, drowning it out with substances to the best of his ability.  But there was only so much help a hit of nicotine and a glass of hard liquor could give him, and it wasn’t much.

He stared at the door across from him, willing it to change, to open, so he could bitch out whichever of his unlucky partners happened to be the one to let him know of their imminent arrival.

That was who he was, deep down: a frothing ball of impotent rage lashing out in every direction.  He’d tried to tame it – control it – but his efforts amounted to little.

Here he was, being sent right back into the underworld he thought he’d finally escaped, as if the last few years hadn’t happened.  Peppy and the rest of the Cornerian brass knew he could slide right back into this role, which meant they knew it was still there, broiling just beneath the surface.

The worst part was that he didn’t even deny it and turn the mission down.  No, he elected of his own free will to dive right back into the cesspool he spent so long trying to drudge himself out of.  Rationalizations and moralizations be damned: Wolf was going to Fichina because he knew this was his specialty.  This was what he exceled at.

Even when he was playing for the good guys, his greatest asset was his inherent scumminess.

Wolf laughed to himself in the dark.

How could he have ever thought he and Fox would work?  That he even _deserved_ someone like Fox?  That was the worst part of all this: Wolf could handle being a sack of shit, he had been for years.  Decades, even.

But Fox?  What kind of monster would he be to drag down someone like that into the mud with him?  Wolf was corrosive, and he had the self-awareness to know it.  The workings of his mind – his thoughts, his memories, his emotions – were as violent and caustic as the seas of Zoness.  How long could Fox stay afloat on that ocean before drowning?  How long could he last before he grew to resent the man who set him adrift upon it?

This realization only further fueled the lupine’s rage.  Rage at his family for making him what he was, rage at Corneria for pointing it out to his face.

Rage at himself for being Wolf O’Donnell.

A pert series of knocks on the door rang out, the noise sounding as loud as bombs going to Wolf’s sensitive ears.  It had to be Fay – Panther knew not to knock that heavily when Wolf retreated to his quarters.

_Unlucky her, then_.

Wolf got up and stalked to the door, manually sliding it aside with more force then necessary.  The Airgead’s automatic door systems had stopped working years ago.

Fay’s permanent smile faltered somewhat upon seeing him.  He knew he must look like a mess: shirtless, untrimmed muzzle fur, bloodshot eye, the scent of bad booze probably burning her canine nose, equally as sensitive as his own.

“ _What_ ”, he bit out.

She forced her grin back to maximum capacity.  It pissed him off.

“We’ll be making planetfall in an hour, cap’n!”

He wordlessly stared at her for a moment, his expression as cold and wrathful as the angry demons that haunted the folklore of the very planet they were fast approaching.  Her smile began to stumble the longer he kept his glare affixed.

He watched it fall from forced cheerfulness, tumble down into anxiety, and finally settling on something approaching fear.  He’d never seen such a range of emotions in his teammate before.

“I told you not to call me that.”

She fumbled her words for a few seconds before getting them out.  “It’s j-just – I’m just trying to be nice –”

“ _WELL I DON’T APPRECIATE IT!_ ”

She recoiled from him as if he’d clawed her across the face.

“I’ve had it to _here_ ”, he said through clenched teeth, raising his paw to his chest, “with your quirky little ‘nice girl’ act.  I’m _sick_ of babysitting you to make sure you don’t pull something retarded on a mission, I’m _sick_ of your shitty jokes, and I’m _sick as hell_ of you bothering me all the time.”

The smallest beads of moisture began to materialize at the corners of her eyes.  Ignoring them, he leaned down, setting his muzzle a few inches from her face with a growl.  “So, as your _cap’n_ , my order is to turn your fluffy ass around and _FUCK.  OFF_.”

She stood in silence muzzle to muzzle with him, a single tear finally escaping and trailing down her fur.  They stared each other down for a moment.

He felt the slap before he saw it coming.

She was already well down the hall when he raised his eyes upwards again, absently rubbing at his muzzle.  He stood in the hall for another few seconds, swaying back and forth slightly.  He must have had more to drink than he thought.

He retreated back into the dark, intent on polishing off the rest of that bottle.

Wolf didn’t mind the darkness.

 

……….

 

Fichina was every bit as welcoming as he remembered it from his last ill-fated venture here: blisteringly high-speed winds in the upper atmosphere, almost no sunlight, and a temperature far lower than what was reasonable to live in.

He really wasn’t in the mood to think about the last time he was here: he was already testy enough as it was, and thinking about _him_ would only incense him further.

Not that focusing on what was going on in the here and now around him was much better.  Fay hadn’t said a single word to him since his outburst; and Panther was walking on eggshells around him, cultivating his aura of distant courteousness to its absolute limit to avoid setting the lupine off.

In some dingy back-alley of Wolf’s subconscious, he knew he went off the handle with Fay and felt bad about it.

But in _another_ , he felt great.

Not from the actual act of bitching her out, but rather its aftermath.  Fay probably hated him now – saw him as a washed-up, broken drunk of an old dog incapable of learning any new tricks.  He relished in the brilliant glow of his own self-destruction; he always had.

One less canine to see him as anything other than what he really was in the universe.

Their Wolfens pierced through the densest part of the planet’s atmosphere, lancing through the towering, swollen stormheads pregnant with snow like hot needles through a boil.  Their formation held the practiced looseness of a tight unit masquerading as something less than what it was.  Wolf wondered how they managed to hold it together considering how much the others must despise him.

“We’re approaching the coordinates the good agent supplied”, Panther stated calmly over the comm-line.  Rentador had sent them the time and location of their meeting with the mysterious contact before they departed.

Wolf took a look at his own HUD, shoving away the garbage dump of his rioting unconscious and trying to focus on the task at hand.

“Let’s not put down too close; don’t want to make it look like we’re meeting them specifically.”  He spotted an open commercial traffic hangar at the other end of the town from their contact on the map and pinged it for Panther and Fay.  They’d know what to do.

Their craft finally emerged from the cloud layer, and Wolf took in the sight.

Fichina was beautiful in a cold, distant sort of way.  Towering mountain peaks lined the horizon, with shimmering ribbons of aurorae weaving their way across the sky like undulating, polychromatic serpents.  Rivers flowed across the landscape beneath them, kept just above freezing-point thanks to the planet’s copious climate control systems.  Wolf saw a multitude of sheltered hydroponic farms standing in the deepest parts of the nearest river – Fichina’s soil was too cold and full of permafrost to grow anything substantial, so the internally-heated facilities were the only viable way to feed the planet; and even then, Fichina was still the biggest per capita importer of foodstuffs in the system.

The only reason anyone even set up shop on the big ball of ice in the first place was the astounding mineral wealth hiding beneath said permafrost.  Fichina’s crust was as full of rare earth minerals as its surface was covered with snow, and the mining operations here were lucrative enough to justify the ridiculously complicated endeavor of enacting planetary climate control just to make its bounty easier to access.

But with those types of high-risk, high-reward investments came along the sort of people willing to make them.  At first that meant brave explorers, venture capitalists and the odd loony – but as the centuries passed, it attracted a new crowd of highly-motivated, highly-dangerous criminals.  Fichina was ultimately eclipsed by Macbeth when it came to mining operations in Lylat, but it developed a niche of its own as the prime hotspot for organized crime in the system.  Anyone who wanted to amount to anything substantial in the underworld did business with at least one of the Fichina Families: de facto lords of the criminal world, kings and queens of crookery.

Wolf narrowly avoided the siren call back during his Sargasso days, despite Leon and even Panther not-so-subtly pressing him to do business with the Families.  The lupine knew the moment you worked with a Family was the moment that Family owned you, and you would never be your own man again.  Being the lone wolf he was, that idea rubbed him the wrong way, and he declined.

And yet here he was, ready to meet with someone in the Families.  Irony of ironies.

They approached the town from the south.  It was an ugly little burg of cheap alloy prefab houses, like so many others on the planet.  For every mining camp that took off, there was at least one other that didn’t, and the failures tended to get left behind in the same state they were built, left to languor and rust in economic and emotional depression.

The trio set their Wolfens down in the open-roofed hangar at the edge of town.  The only other ships inside were a big, ugly freighter tagged with graffiti, and some hotrod starfighter with a flame-pattern paintjob that probably belonged to a dumb kid trying to make a name for themselves.

Wolf took a deep breath upon landing and sat in his cockpit for a few seconds longer than necessary, ruminating.  He was still a little drunk and hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep in over a cycle.  Perfect time for a clandestine mission in dangerous gang territory.

_Just like the good old days_.

Except they hadn’t been good, and he’d been more than happy to leave them behind him.

He opened the cockpit window and jumped out, Panther and Fay already ahead of him.  The feline stood off to the side and nodded at him – but Fay pointedly refused to make eye contact.  She wasn’t even wearing her omnipresent, somewhat-distressing smile.

Wolf grimaced and kept walking.

They fell in behind him easy enough, each lagging a bit to the back, flanking one of his sides; eerily similar to their formation when flying missions.  The trio was awkwardly silent as they left the hangar, but Wolf thought that was perhaps for the best.  Anything that came out of his mouth today was bound to be needlessly vitriolic, and he’d already dug a deep enough hole from himself.

The town looked even worse from the ground than it had on their fly-over.  Half the prefabs were rusted to hell and back, and looked like they were probably abandoned; though Wolf couldn’t tell for certain – you never knew where a homeless squatter might shack up.  There wasn’t even as much graffiti as he thought there would be; apparently this place was too depressing even for that.  It was like someone stuck a bunch of makeshift shelters in the middle of the tundra and called it a day, never to return.

Which likelier than not was close to what actually happened.

Signs of life started to appear and gradually increase in number as they slowly made their way deeper into the heart of the little village.  Garish neon signs emblazoned shady-looking establishments that ranged from dive bars, to places that were possibly underground brothels, to places that were _definitely_ underground brothels.  Each one was blasting a slightly different genre of obnoxious-sounding electronic music.  The cacophony was doing nothing to alleviate his already burgeoning hangover.

And he thought Zoness was a crapheap.

Half the shops along the unpaved strip of cinder that must have been what passed for a ‘road’ around here had bouncers standing outside, sizing the three of them up with glares as they passed.  Wolf met each and every one with a lopsided grin of his own, and every single one of them turned away from his stare, to a man.

It was simultaneously an uncomfortable reminder of who and what he had been; and yet, it also fueled his ego more than he cared to admit.  On some level, he missed getting that unique brand of fear-informed respect from thugs and ruffians.  The fact that he did only made him feel even _more_ like shit than he already was.

As they neared the designated meeting spot, Wolf pealed off to the side a bit, coming to a halt and standing as inconspicuously as he possibly could.  Panther and Fay stopped alongside him.

“We should come up with a plan before we jump in there”, Wolf said.  Internal strife or otherwise, he was the leader here, and he needed to act like it.

Panther folded his arms.  “I can go in ahead and scope it out; comm you to give the all-clear if nothing looks suspicious.”

Wolf nodded his approval.  “Good – we don’t want to walk into a trap.”  He turned to look at their supposed Enclave contact’s choice of locale more closely: a dive not dissimilar to any of the others they’d already passed.  “Any chance you could peg our guy while you’re in there?”

The feline raised his paw to his muzzle in thought, twiddling one of his long whiskers.  “Possibly… I was under the impression they were supposed to seek _us_ out, though?  I doubt I will be able to discern which of the hoodlums in there is _our_ hoodlum at a glance.”

The lupine agreed.  Their contact’s message said to sit down at a specific booth in the back corner, at which point the contact in question would sit with them and initiate the conversation.  Wolf wished they could get some idea of who it was before diving in headfirst, though.

He turned to Fay.  “Any ideas?”

She looked surprised to be called on, and opened her mouth to speak before anticlimactically closing it without saying a word.  She shook her head.

Wolf grunted.  “Alright then.  Panther, you go in first; let me know what’s up.”

Panther nodded and stepped away from them.  He casually strode across the graveled street and entered the bar without so much as a backward glance.

Wolf felt incredibly awkward standing at the corner with Fay, the only worthwhile illumination coming from a single streetlamp over their heads.  He debated saying something a few times as they waited.  Maybe an apology, or a joke.  Something, _anything_ to break the silence.  Her demeanor was so far afield from her usual state of being that it disturbed him almost as much as everything else going on.

He never got the chance, though: Panther commed him with a curt ‘all-clear’, and the moment passed.  Fay would go on disliking him, and he would go on like the mammal he always was: one who inspired fear and distrust.

With that thought he crossed the street himself, Fay tagging along as silent as a ghost.  He pushed open the saloon doors and stepped out of the cold – and back into a world colder than any blizzard could dream of being.

 

……….

 

The interior of the establishment was more or less exactly what he expected based on what they’d seen of the rest of the town: dingy, near non-existent lighting; a smattering of clientele strewn about the room, half of them lost to the world outside their bottle and the other half turning to him with a glare; and it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in maybe a decade.

In other words, it was the exact kind of place Wolf tended to find himself on a semi-regular basis.

He didn’t make eye contact with any of the patrons, instead moving towards the bar with a bit more swagger than usual.  He could see Panther out of the corner of his eye, sitting at a stool further down the line – he didn’t show any sign of recognizing him though, and neither did the lupine.  They tended to work this way in these types of situations: Wolf would meet the contact, and Panther would sit off in another part of the room.  If something went down, he could jump from being just another customer in the ratty dive to a trained merc in five seconds flat and bail them out.

Wolf made eye contact with the spindly, anemic-looking ibex manning the bar.  The caprine spoke with a quavering voice.  “Anything I can get for you, sir?”

He almost laughed at how out-of-place this old goat was.  “What do you got on tap?”  Fay settled into the stool next to him, still unsmiling.

The ibex made a thoughtful humming noise.  “Not much, I’m afraid.  It’s been a long while since I could afford to stock more than cheap brews.”

Wolf nodded.  He was right: defunct mining town, then.  “I’ll have a pint of whatever’s the least disgusting.”

The goat smiled.  “Good choice.”  He turned to look at Fay.  “And what about you, miss?”

Wolf almost said ‘no’ for her when she spoke up.  “Same as he’s having.”

The ibex nodded and walked away to get their drinks.  Wolf turned to glance at Fay in surprise; he’d never known her to drink anything stronger than a virgin cocktail.  But she was fixated in the opposite direction, obviously still avoiding eye contact.

Wolf turned away with a huff and distracted himself by taking in the other patrons in the pub, wondering which one was their anonymous ‘ally’.  The jacked rooster near the door who looked a few tren cycles shy of becoming a sentient mass of muscle?  The red squirrel nursing her drink while listlessly playing around with her comm-device?  The aye-aye in the corner with the shifty eyes?

The bartender brought their drinks, and Wolf thanked him with a few crinkled-up bills.  “Keep the change”, he said as the ibex took them and smiled.

“You’re a kind man.”

Wolf grinned at him with the slightest hint of mania.  “As far as you know.”

He turned to the side and off the stool, and walked over to the corner booth, Fay at his tail.  It was now or never, he thought.  The moment of truth.  Either he’d meet their mysterious contact, or half the room would erupt in blasterfire as soon as he sprung the trap.

Part of him almost wanted the latter; he was itching for a fight, had been all day.

But it wasn’t to be.  Not long after he and Fay took their seats, the red squirrel casually got up and sidled into the booth alongside his partner, across from him.

She was small for her species, which was already small to begin with, and looked distinctly uncomfortable to be sitting where she was.  “The cat hollers at midnight.”

“And the fox responds”, Wolf said, completing the other half of the message outlined in the communique to confirm their identity.

The squirrel sighed with relief.  She looked at him curiously.  “You weren’t what I was expecting.”

Wolf wasn’t in the mood for wordplay.  “Cut the crap and let’s just get to it, shall we?”

She looked taken aback, but ultimately nodded.  “Alright.  I’m here on behalf of my employer; we want absolute proof that Corneria won’t take legal action against us upfront, before we divulge anything.”

Wolf frowned.  “I was under the impression we were meeting the snitch _here_.”

He could tell she didn’t approve of his choice of wording.  “My employer is an incredibly important individual; it’s too risky for them to be seen.”

“And it’s not risky for you?”

She shook her head.  “No one knows who I am.”

Wolf grunted.  “Fine.  Tell me who it is and we’ll go meet them ourselves.”

“No”, the squirrel said adamantly.  “I want proof of pardons first.”

He growled but fished the comm-device out of his pocket regardless, bringing up the document written by Rentador and handing the device to her.  “Here.  It’s all in there.”  The document in question was several pages long and written in legalese jargon; Wolf hoped she wasn’t going to actually spend time reading through it then and there.

…And it looked like she was doing exactly that.

He groaned and started downing his drink; Corneria wasn’t paying him enough for this.

Several minutes passed before she nodded, seemingly pleased with what she read, and handed his device back.  “Very well; I can take you to my employer now.”

“We can’t just go ourselves?”

She stared forward with a glassy look, and Wolf could smell the sudden rush of fear hormones coming off her.  “What, you’re scared of me _now?_ ”

Fay poked him in the side and he turned to her.  She jerked her head, indicating something behind her.  Wolf understood – the squirrel wasn’t staring at him, she was staring _past_ him.

He surreptitiously turned himself to look towards the front of the bar, and –

“ _Oh for fuck’s sake_ ”, he grumbled as he jerked himself back.  It was in vain, he knew – the newcomer had already seen him, and would doubtless be making their way over right now.

He heard the soft pattering of his boots as he approached, coming to a stop right beside him.  His cybernetic eye could see him in infrared: his cold blood running blue.

“Well, well, well – it _has_ been a while, hasn’t it?”, their interloper said with that malicious tone of voice of his that Wolf once relied on so much to strike fear in their enemies.

The lupine turned to face him; his traditional manic, lopsided grin plastered on his face.

It really was just like old times.

“Hello, Leon.”

The chameleon snickered: a wheezing, unhealthy sound.  “That all you have to say for yourself, _captain?_ ”

Wolf took in the state of the bar with a carefully neutral expression.  The rooster at the door and the aye-aye in the corner were now standing, holstered blasters in their grasp.  Leon had brought another pair in with him: a bulky Rottweiler and a lithe caracal who looked like he spent most of his free time preening himself.  Panther was still facing the bar, ignoring the events unfolding around him, but Wolf knew he was ready to act based on how he carefully positioned himself to pounce.  The ibex bartender looked genuinely fearful: a deer in the headlights.

The lupine realized it really _was_ a trap: not for him, but for their informant.

“I’m just here on business, old friend”, Wolf stated casually.  “Gonna fault me for finally taking your advice and getting cozy with the Families?”

Leon scoffed.  “You don’t expect me to actually buy that, do you?”

Wolf shrugged.  “Believe whatever you want to – but the fact is, I’m here looking for work.”  He put on a relaxed grin.  “Turns out jobs on the up-and-up don’t pay as much as I thought they would.”

The chameleon frowned at him for a moment, before he put on a smile of his own.  Leon’s smiles always freaked Wolf out.

“So the mighty Wolf O’Donnell comes crawling back to the dirt?”  He laughed that wheezing laugh of his again.  “You have no idea how much I want to believe it – you deserve that kind of comeuppance.  But, alas –”

He flicked his head to the side, and his compatriots drew their blasters.

“I know it’s a load of shit.”

Panther spun out of his stool and fired off a shot, taking the caracal in the back and dropping him instantly.  Wolf took the opportunity while Leon was surprised to upend the table in the booth into a makeshift shield, drawing Fay and their contact behind it with him.

Wolf peeked out from behind it with his blaster, but Leon ducked behind a table of his own, firing off a series of shots into Wolf’s barrier.  The lupine was happy it was touch enough to withstand them.

Meanwhile, Panther narrowly dodged a series of blaster bolts from the remaining attackers as he jumped behind the counter, pulling the ibex down with a forceful paw seconds before a bolt streaked across right where his head had been, striking the wall.  The feline creeped out of the side of the counter and got off another few shots, hitting the rooster in his thigh and injuring him.

Wolf knew it was only a matter of time before Leon called in backup – he needed to end this quick.

“Fay, keep her squared away.”

She turned to look at him questioningly, but ultimately nodded.

Wolf jumped over the barricade while Leon was busy focused on Panther (holding his own and drawing away fire to a masterly degree; Wolf needed to give him a bigger cut of this mission’s earnings) and snagged the chameleon from behind, putting his blaster to the lizard’s head.

“Got ya.”

The firefight came to a standstill as Wolf carefully stood up with Leon in his grip.  “Put your guns down, boys.”  He let the threat of what he’d do if they didn’t go unspoken, opting instead to reinforce it by pushing his blaster deeper into the side of the reptile’s temple.

The remaining animals stood for a second, unsure of what to do.  The rooster was immobile but still in the fight; Wolf thought the Caracal was probably dead.

He let his guard down in that moment, seeing the fight as over and done with.  Then the aye-aye popped Panther in the shoulder with his rifle, the feline crumbling with a gasp; and the rottweiler, on the other side of the counter, reached down behind it and yanked the ibex out, putting his own blaster to that goat’s head.

Wolf stood there in shock, and Leon laughed again.

“Well?”, the chameleon gloated.  “Aren’t you going to paint the wall with my brains, _captain?_ ”

Wolf felt the blaster shake in his paw.  He wanted to.  _Oh_ , did he want to.

He’d never killed a captive in cold blood before though.

“Let me down, or my boy over there will kill the goat.”

The dog slammed the ibex into the counter for emphasis.  The bartender’s eyes were bulging out of his head, and he was quivering in fear so profoundly it looked like he was thrown naked into the blizzard outside.

Wolf felt his own shaking stop, and he dropped his gun.  He shoved Leon away, and the chameleon fell to the floor unceremoniously.

“ _WHAT!?_ ”, he could hear their contact screech from behind the barricade.  “ _What are you doing!?_ ”

Leon chuckled as he picked himself back up.  “What he always does: pussy out at the last moment.”  He signaled his men to round up Wolf and his compatriots.  The lupine felt his paws cuffed and locked with an electromagnetic hum.

“Panther needs medical attention”, he said quietly.

Leon waved his hand dismissively.  “He’ll get it.”

The rottweiler let the ibex go and walked over to the barrier with the aye-aye; they retrieved Fay and the contact from behind it, cuffing them as sure as they did Wolf.  The squirrel glared at Wolf with red-hot rage.

Leon cuffed Panther himself, the feline turning to him with a snarl, as if he was ready to bite.

“Panther”, Wolf said pointedly.

They made eye contact, and Panther forced himself to calm down.

“You really screwed up on this one, Wolf”, Leon said with a sickening smile.  “If there’s one thing the Families hate more than anything else, it’s traitors.”  He turned to the squirrel with a look of sadistic glee.  “And people who do business with traitors are no better than traitors themselves.  For someone so determined to avoid getting tied up with the Families, you sure picked the worst possible way to piss them off.”

Leon had his prisoners lined up, blasters trained on them by his men.  There was a look of triumph on the chameleon’s face.  “You have no idea how good this feels.”

Wolf stared him down.  “For someone angry about traitors, you sure seem keen on betraying your old team, _Leon_.”  He bit the reptile’s name out like a curse.

The lizard in question remained unphased.  “It’s nothing personal – just business.”  He turned to face the bartender, who still looked shell-shocked.  “Speaking of business: we can’t have any witnesses.”

The shot rang out before Wolf even had the chance to process his words, and the crumpled form of the old ibex splayed out across the ground.  The dead goat looked like he was staring right at Wolf from his position: eyes wide in surprise, no blood seeping from the instantly cauterized, smoking wound in the center of his forehead.  Stray bits of superheated brain lay strewn across the floor behind him, let loose by the impact of the blast.

Just another image to stalk Wolf’s nightmares.

“You said you wouldn’t have him killed if I let you go.”

Leon smiled with a satisfied grin as reptilian as his species.  “I lied.”

He turned to his men.  “Throw ‘em in the back of the hovercraft; I’m sure Mistress Catarina will be pleased to see the kind of scum that frequent her territory.”  He said the last bit with a pointed look at the squirrel, who – to her credit – retained her posture in the face of the chameleon’s unabashed cruelty.  Wolf shouldn’t have expected less from someone in the Families; she was probably used to shit like this.

That thought didn’t make him feel any better.

Leon slapped Wolf’s shoulder with a hand.  “Don’t worry, _old friend_.  We’ll have time to catch up soon enough.”  He smiled again, and it made Wolf’s skin crawl.

“I’m sure we’ll have oodles of fun together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leon is based more off of his Assault characterization in this story.
> 
> Thanks for kudos and comments, criticism welcome as always.


	5. Chapter 5

# IV

 

The lupine’s head bumped into the backrest of the seat for the eighth time in the last ten minutes.  He couldn’t even readjust his position to avoid it, since he was currently ‘tied’ to the seat by way of electromagnetic manacles.

He turned to the muscular rooster seated next to him with his smarmiest grin.  “Say, can I bother you for something?”

The rooster glared at him with a look that clearly said ‘no, you may not’, focused as he was on keeping the pressure up on his wounded thigh.  Wolf continued anyway.

“Would you mind lowering the headrest?  It’s hard as a rock and if I slam into it any more it’s going to give me a concussion.”

To his surprise, the rooster actually reached his hand behind Wolf’s head – only to pistol-whip it.

Wolf grunted in pain as the damnable bird smiled at him maliciously.  He ignored the throbbing and shot him a spiteful grin of his own.  “Thanks, friend”, he said with a venomous tone.

He was going to kill that fucking rooster before this was over.

Wolf turned his head the other direction to take in his teammates.  Panther was gripping his shoulder where it had been shot, but looked mostly fine considering.  The shot had missed any vital areas, and it would heal up fine with some basic medical attention – he wouldn’t be flying or shooting any time soon though.

Fay kept her head facing forward, seemingly undaunted by their relatively severe twist of fate.  She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either, opting instead to wear a neutral expression.

Their informant was nowhere to be seen: Leon had hauled her into a different compartment of the spacious ground vehicle.  Wolf could only imagine what was going on with the two of them – and unfortunately, he had a very good imagination, bolstered by his knowledge of how Leon liked to operate.

He had difficulty figuring out what his relationship with the chameleon was – or _had been_ now, he supposed.  Whatever they were in the past was clearly out the window at this point.

Leon was never quite what he’d call a ‘friend’, but the lizard was the closest thing to it during the early days of their unit.  Wolf never got along with Andrew, who was only placed on Star Wolf at his uncle’s behest.  The ape was arrogant, vain, and – although he was fairly intelligent – he wasn’t as intelligent as he _thought_ he was: a dangerous combination.

And as for Pigma?  Wolf avoided that one as much as he possibly could while off-duty.  The porcine was a crack pilot, a masterful tactician, and his vulgar personality masked one of the most devious minds Wolf ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

Plus there was the fact that the porker was a dirty traitor.

Leon was the only respectful member of Star Wolf besides himself, Wolf thought back then.  The only teammate he’d want at his side, considering Andrew would probably fail at anything too difficult and Pigma was equally as liable to stab him in the back as he was to fight alongside him.

But Wolf wasn’t an idiot: Leon might have been the most dependable of his teammates, but that was like saying gonorrhea was the best sexually-transmitted disease.  The chameleon didn’t have a cruel streak so much as he had a body of pure cruelty.  Sadistic, masochistic, malevolent – he was a scary son of a bitch.  More than a few times Leon got information they needed from someone through some pretty nasty means.  Wolf mentally absolved himself of guilt by telling himself, _‘well hey, at least_ I’m _not the one doing the torturing – my hands are clean’_.

It was utter bullshit though.  Wolf was equally as culpable as Leon in each and every one of those scenarios.  He was the captain after all; if he really wanted to put an end to it, he could have.

Things changed after Andrew left to fulfill his destiny of trying to be his uncle and sucking at it, shortly after the Lylat War ended.  Wolf, Leon and Pigma worked as a trio for a few years, the lupine sucking it up and agreeing to work with the fat hog for as long as he could stand it.

Pigma had a brilliant mind when it came to the world of criminal enterprise, and Wolf couldn’t deny he’d been an essential part of his little Sargasso empire’s rise to prominence.  Wolf even ignored it when the porcine started skimming off a bit of the profits for himself; the amount of overall income he brought in more than made up for it.

But the hog finally overstepped his bounds when he laundered a solid half of their total annual income one year using a network of catspaws and agents he’d seeded into Sargasso over his tenure.  By the time Wolf and Leon found out what happened, he’d already flown off.

They chased him down to the very planet they both found themselves on today – but the money was already gone, Pigma having invested it into several Family ventures and securing a cozy spot for himself in Fichina’s underworld.

That was the last time Wolf set foot on this godforsaken heap of snow, and he’d hated it ever since.  He knew it was mostly his own damn fault, though.  Pigma was Pigma: the man was a pathological liar, schemer, and thief.  He was simply doing what he was wired to do.  _Wolf_ was the one who kept him around despite being fully aware of this fact – he’d brought it on himself.

He and Leon brought Panther on shortly after the porcine’s departure; and though the feline never brought in the sort of cash and opportunities Pigma did, Wolf considered it a straight upgrade.

His rumination was interrupted when the door to the back compartment of the vehicle opened and Leon walked out.  The lizard signaled the rooster to lift Wolf up.

“Bring him back – it’s _his_ turn for questioning, now.”

Wolf’s stomach turned.  He’d been tortured a few times in the past, sure – but none of his torturers could ever hold a candle to Leon Powalski when it came to sheer creativity.  The chameleon was an artist: his canvas a person’s body, his tools whatever he could get his hands on.  One could say he was a master with mixed media.

He tremulously walked into the back compartment, the barrel of the rooster’s blaster pressed against the small of his back, and Leon sizing him up like a piece of meat.  It wasn’t lost on Wolf that the way Leon looked at his victims was similar to the way most people would size up a potential mate for a one-night stand.

The lupine took one last glance towards his teammates, Panther wavering between wakefulness and sleep, and Fay looking at him with the most scared expression he’d ever seen on her face, before the rooster shoved him hard and he fall face-first onto the floor of the compartment beyond.

As the door sealed behind him, the room was swathed in darkness.  He tried to get himself up (a difficult task due to his manacled paws), but he felt a boot press hard on his back and push him back down onto the floor.

“I don’t think so”, Leon’s cold voice rang out.  “You’re going to stay right where you are.”

“Gonna be difficult to get at me from this position, don’t you think?”  He might be a captive, but damn if he was ever going to let go of his pride.

The chameleon laughed: a spine-chilling sound.  “Don’t worry, captain.  I have plenty of ways to ‘get at’ you.”  Wolf saw Leon’s boots walk around in front of him, and soon the totality of the reptile’s body came into view as he approached a dark lump of something in the middle of the room.  Leon flicked on the lights, and suddenly the ‘lump’ was identifiable: their squirrel contact, tied to a chair with manacles of her own, one eye swollen.

“I know you well, Wolf”, Leon said.  “I know how you struggle – how you can never quite decide who you are.”  He moved to stand behind the captive, his hands behind his back.  “Leading a criminal empire, but enforcing arbitrary limits to what we can and cannot do within it.  Waging war against Lylat, but then saving them from destruction: not once, but _twice_.  You can’t make up your mind, Wolf – can you?”

He walked back towards Wolf and crouched, his face leaning in just outside the reach of Wolf’s muzzle.  _If he was just an inch closer_ , Wolf thought, _I could bite that smile off_.

The chameleon’s eyes were lidded with glee.  “You’re a bundle of contradictions, _captain_ – you always have been.”  He stood back up and returned to the squirrel, for her part holding her head high and trying her best to look unphased.

“So today, I’m going to conduct an experiment.  We’re finally going to learn just what you are, Wolf.  Villain, or hero?  Sinner, or saint?”

Wolf had seen Leon go off on these sorts of rants in the past, but he’d never been on the receiving end of one.  He always thought they were something Leon did to freak people out; get them into a vulnerable position to score some worthwhile intel.

But now?  Wolf was starting to think Leon didn’t do this to psych people out so much as he did it because was a straight psycho _path_.

“What are you talking about, Leon?”

The chameleon laughed again.  “ _You_ , captain.  We’re going to find out what you’re really made of.”  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thin, razor-sharp knife.  “Our traitorous friend here won’t talk – she’s too well-trained.  But you?”  He smiled an open-toothed smile, revealing rows of teeth as sharp as the blade of his knife.  “You’re an unknown factor.  Who knows what you’ll do?  Maybe you’ll talk, maybe you won’t.”

Wolf growled; his patience was wearing thin.  “Then come over here and try.”

Leon shook his head.  “Oh no, _that_ won’t work on you.  You’re much too stubborn.”  He paused for a beat, his smile turning into something grotesque.

“But this might.”

His hand shot out like a blur and sliced the blade across the squirrel’s cheek.  She flinched, but stayed silent as a thin line of red began to ooze from the shallow cut.

The chameleon turned to stare Wolf in the eyes.  “Talk, or I continue.”

Wolf grimaced.  “This is ridiculous.”

Leon shot his hand out again, this time cutting her horizontally across the forehead.  Wolf could see tears burgeon at the corner of her eyes.

“What are you, Wolf?  Will you hold your tongue and sentence her to this fate?  Or will you speak and save her life?”  He turned to look at his captive with a manic look in his eyes.  “I’m genuinely curious.  In fact, I don’t think even _you_ know the answer to that question.”  He turned his head back to look at him.  “Consider this a learning opportunity for the both of us.”

Wolf felt a hot serpent of nausea uncoil in his gut.  He felt like he was living a nightmare.  “I don’t even know her”, he said weakly.

Leon held his hand this time.  “Then that makes this all the clearer.  Will _Lord O’Donnell_ save the life of an unknown, or will he save himself?”

It didn’t feel real.  _None_ of this felt real.  Leon, Fichina, his argument with Fay, the ibex’s dead eyes staring at him.  He was going to close his own eye and reopen it to find himself in bed on the Airgead, the day just beginning.

_No cigar_ , he thought as he tried doing exactly that.  He was still tied up on the ground, Leon standing over the squirrel like a hungry predator ready to dig into its meal.  He sought her gaze, and she responded: a steadfast pair of eyes meeting his own.  Leon was right; she _was_ trained for situations like this.

But could Wolf really inflict that on her, just to save a mission?  There was no guarantee Leon wouldn’t just kill him and his team anyway, regardless of what transpired here.

The fact that Wolf was even considering this drew out that snake of nausea again.

“Your silence speaks volumes”, Leon said coolly, his knife launching for another swipe across her like a spring-coiled serpent snapping at its prey.  It took her across the cheek again, his cuts forming a cross.  He looked at the lightly-bloodied knife like he wanted to lick it.  Wolf felt his stomach revolt once more.

“Doing nothing to stop me is the same as letting me continue, you know”.  The reptile’s eyes bored into Wolf’s own.  “Or did you think you were innocent all those times in the past?”

“No”, the lupine responded weakly.  “I’m not an idiot, Leon.”

The chameleon huffed.  “Could’ve fooled me.  Coming to Fichina to meet with a traitor to the Families strikes me as a mighty idiotic move.”

The seeds of a plan started to take root in Wolf’s mind.  “Have you ever known me to do something that dumb?”, he asked in an even tone.

For the first time that day, Wolf saw Leon’s arrogant façade crumble a little, if for only a fleeting moment.  “No, not when we worked together.”  But the lizard rebuilt it as fast as it fell, that malicious smile returning to his face.  “But now?  Don’t play me for a fool, Wolf.  We get the extranet on Fichina, you know.”  He cocked his head to the side mockingly.  “Or did you think no one here saw you sucking face with Fox McCloud, of all people?”

Wolf kept his expression neutral.  “Who I choose to fuck with my free time is irrelevant.”  He shrugged – or at least he tried to from his prone position.  “That’s got nothing to do with why I’m here.”

Leon scoffed.  “You expect me to believe that?”

The lupine almost put on a greasy, lopsided grin before he remembered Leon would never fall for it.  “No; but I expect you to believe I’m not dumb enough to come here on behalf of fucking Corneria of all things.”

The chameleon put his hand to his chin in thought.  “And I suppose you’d be willing to tell me who you’re working for, then?  In exchange for her life, of course.”

Wolf grunted.  “You’re assuming this whole dumb test you’ve set up here even makes any sense, that I’m here trying to screw over the Families – truth is, I don’t give a shit what you do to her.”  This time, he grinned.  “But her employer might.”

The best part was that it wasn’t technically lying.  The squirrel’s employer was in the Families, and only seeking out help from Corneria to save them from whoever killed Volskov.  Really, Wolf _was_ working in the Families’ best interest, when you thought about it.

As long as he kept telling himself that, he could keep this up.

“Her employer is quite an important person”, Leon said with a sneer.  “I should know, because they’re _my_ employer too.”  The chameleon looked proud of himself.  “I caught our little sciurid friend sneaking out and decided to follow her, only to find her meeting _you_.  So tell me, Wolf”, he said with a questioning tone.

“Why shouldn’t I believe she’s ratting us out to Corneria, now that you’re fucking their golden boy, at your own admission.”

Wolf decided to tell him the truth.

“Because she met with me at your employer’s request.  Which means you just cut up your own boss’s messenger.”

There was no hesitation in Wolf’s voice, no hint he might be lying.  There didn’t need to be.

Leon realized this, and Wolf couldn’t help but enjoy watching the lizard look hot under the collar for a change.  “And why is my employer asking Star Wolf for help?”

Wolf smiled.  “Why don’t you ask them that yourself?”

 

……….

 

The manse of their contact (and Leon’s employer, apparently) was just as paradoxically austere and decadent as Wolf guessed it would be, and then some.

In the early days of their rise to power, the Families often tried to outdo one another with increasingly more elaborate, palatial mansions – the Fichina gothic style of architecture they used was intentionally religious in scope and ornamentation, designed to strike a sort of awed, pious fear in those who came calling.  Each Family’s abode was more monumental than the last, increasing in size and detail roughly according to the individual Family’s rank.

Their vehicle came to a stop outside the front gate – though to call it that was an understatement, as it was more of a fortified castle wall.  As armed guards checked them out and ultimately allowed them to pass, they drove up a path lined with peristyles: each column adorned with an angel or gargoyle perched atop it, silently passing judgment on those who approached.

The manse itself looked like a monolithic stone cathedral from out of Corneria’s distant past.  It was a towering edifice from which spires lined with fine statuary reached into the blisteringly cold sky – to Wolf’s eye, it looked like the statues were bracing against the blizzard winds, their billowing stone robes and wings buffeted by the ceaseless tempest.  A grand colonnade extended the length of the manse’s entryway, and at the heart of its facing façade was a massive, impossibly ornate rose window depicting scenes of religious import from Corneria’s history.

Wolf had assumed their contact was someone fairly low in the Family’s pecking order: someone with a chip on their shoulder, looking to cash out while they could, coming to Corneria for help because it was their only way to move up in the world.

Judging by this manse, though, he was clearly, very, _very_ wrong.

He was ripped from his thoughts by Leon’s blaster rudely smacking him upside the back of his head.  “Get a move on, _friend_.”

Wolf grunted but did as he was told.  He’d already played his hand – if Leon’s employer really was being legitimate about seeking help from Lylat, then the chameleon would get what was coming to him for roughing up the squirrel and Wolf’s team.

And if not?  Well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.  Wolf was used to playing things by ear.

That damn rooster shoved Panther forward as they exited the vehicle, causing the feline to fall into a snowbank.  Wolf turned to the oversized chicken with a growl and Leon whipped him with his blaster again.

“Enough of this – the Lady is waiting.”

Fay walked out next, as calm as he’d ever seen her, with that aye-aye who looked he was high on amphetamines holding his blaster to her head, his paw quaking all the while.  The squirrel was the last to leave, and Wolf flinched upon seeing her in the daylight; her face was a swollen mess of cuts and bruises.

The chameleon sidled up next to Wolf.  “Really did a number on her, didn’t I?”, he asked with that type of pride typical of small children seeking approval from their parents.

“Yeah”, Wolf responded curtly.  “Bet your boss is going to be real peachy about it.”

That got the lizard to shut up.  He frowned and waved his arm forward, signaling his crew to shepherd their quarry into the manse.  The rooster was only too willing to rough up Panther some more.

Wolf felt Leon’s blaster resume its position at his back.  “I still don’t believe you, you know”, Leon whispered into his ear.  “What you said back there, about why you’re here.”

The lupine grinned.  “You don’t need to – you’ll find out yourself soon enough.”

Wolf truly hoped that was the case.

They made their way to the grand entrance of the manse and passed inside the giant stone doors.  The interior of the mansion was equally as harsh and luxurious as what he’d seen from the outside.  Leon and his crew corralled them into the entrance hall by gunpoint: a richly-decorated space adorned with crimson tapestries, brass braziers holding copious candles, and what was probably the plushest carpet Wolf had ever stepped on.

A young dingo at the front desk stood up in surprise at their arrival.  “Mr. Powalski, the Lady is –”

“Can it”, Leon bit out.  “We’re going to see her.  _Now._ ”

“But sir, she –”

“Don’t care.”  He pressed his gun into Wolf’s back and shoved him forward, and they continued their journey into the heart of the mansion.

Wolf dared to speak.  “That was pretty rude back there, Leon.”

The lizard hissed at him.  “Dorian is nothing.  _I’m_ the Lady’s chief of security – I outrank him.”

They were marched up winding stairways lined with thin, tall windows peering out into the snowy world beyond, and down cold stone hallways home to archaic suits of armor that made Wolf feel like he was being watched, before being unceremoniously shoved into a long room with vaulted ceilings and a roaring fireplace occupying almost an entire wall.

A stately cougar looked up in surprise from her seat at a large, wooden desk as they entered, pushing some paperwork she was working on aside.  “Mr. Powalski?”, she queried, before her eyes scanned the group and settled on the red squirrel.  “ _Melis!?_   _What is the meaning of this?_ ”  She stood up and began to walk towards them.

“My Lady”, Leon said with the most respectful tone Wolf had heard from him since they worked for Andross.  “My team noticed Melis sneaking out earlier in the day – we followed her, only to find her meeting with _Star Wolf_.”  He shoved Wolf forward as he finished, almost knocking him to the floor.

The cougar remained silent for a moment, coolly appraising each of the captives in turn.  Wolf recognized that look when it settled on him: she was sizing him up, one crimelord to another.

“Melis refused to explain why, so I… tried to convince her to speak”, the lizard said proudly.

“Did she?”, the cougar asked, eyes still fixed on the squirrel.

Leon frowned.  “No – but Wolf did.  He said they were meeting with her on your orders.”

_The moment of truth_ , Wolf thought.  This ‘Lady’ held his team’s life in her hands.

And she knew it too, he wagered, staring at him, Panther and Fay in equal turns, as if eying them up long enough would provide more information.  Finally she turned back to her squirrel aide, and spoke up.

“I’m disappointed in you, Melis.”

The squirrel dipped her head apologetically, and the Lady turned back to Wolf.  “As for them: I ordered no such thing of Melis.”

_Dammit_.  Wolf could feel Leon’s smile behind him without even needing to see it.  The chameleon’s tone was disgustingly cheerful.  “I thought not, My Lady.”

The cougar paced back to her desk.  “Get the panther some medical attention, and then throw all three of them in the dungeon.”  She turned to stare at the squirrel.  “Leave Melis here – I want to speak to her.  _Alone_.”  Her tone was as dangerous as that of any crimelord Wolf knew.

Leon bowed.  “Of course, My Lady.”  He turned to the rooster, his flattering tone dissipating instantly.  “Jax, get the cat to the doc.  The rest of you: with me.  We’re going to put this scum where it belongs.”

“ _Wait!_ ”, Fay shouted.

The room went silent – it was the first time she’d said anything since their capture.  The cougar stood by her desk, leaning on it with one paw.  “Yes?”, she asked with more than a hint of exasperation.

Fay swallowed her anxiety, and spoke up.  “I can tell you who we’re working for – why we’re here.”

Wolf’s jaw dropped.  _What the hell?_

“ _Fay!_   What –” 

Leon’s blaster slapped him again.  “Quiet, let the dog talk.”

Fay’s paws fidgeted in their manacles, and she continued.  “I meant what I said.  I’ll tell you everything about our job.”

The cougar walked away from her desk and towards Fay.  “And why should I trust anything someone who betrays their own team has to say?”

“You trust Leon, and he left Star Wolf”, Fay cautiously supplied.  “And Wolf betrayed me first!  I’m barely getting paid anything, and I have debts to pay”.

Wolf couldn’t believe what he was hearing – the genuine anger in her voice.  It was like a nightmarish fever dream.

The Lady stared Fay in the eyes.  “And what do you want in exchange?”

Fay swallowed again.  “A job.  With you.”

The room once more went silent, interrupted by Leon’s chuckles, which slowly turned into out-and-out laughter – his crew laughing along with him.  “Oh _man_.  This is priceless.”  He gleefully turned to Wolf.  “This must be going way better than you ever guessed, huh?”

The cougar raised her paw for silence.  “I don’t have any openings available.”

“We’ll take her!”, Leon said excitedly.  “This is too good to pass up.”  He stalked over to Fay and slammed his hand on her shoulder.  “I bet we’ve got lots in common.”

Wolf stared in shock as Fay smiled right along with Leon – that same oblivious smile she wore almost all the time, until this mission.  “Have you ever accidentally burned down a building?”, she asked innocently.

Leon laughed again.  “ _Please_ , My Lady.

The cougar’s ears fell flat against her head, but she ultimately acquiesced.  “Fine.  Take her, if you will.  Whatever comes of this is on your own head.”  She gestured to Star Wolf.  “Now do your job and get them out of here.”

“Of course, My Lady.”  Leon bowed, and Fay awkwardly bowed alongside him.  The chameleon drew a second blaster from his boot and handed it to her.

The rooster, Jax, slammed his hand down hard on Panther’s shoulder, eliciting a hiss of pain from the feline, and he spirited the cat out of the room – to the medic, Wolf desperately hoped.

The lupine felt two blasters trained at his back now, both wielded by ex-members of Star Wolf.

“You can’t even begin to fathom how much I’m enjoying this”, Leon said, sounding exhilarated.  Fay remained silent, that uncanny smile still plastered on her face.

Wolf half-turned to look at her in the eye.  He wanted to curse her out, but he just didn’t have the energy.  “I’m sorry, Fay”, he said instead.  “Should’ve treated you better.”

Her smile faltered for a beat before returning just as powerfully as before.  “What’s past is past, _cap’n_.  Gotta look to the future now.”

“Amen to that”, Leon hissed, marching Wolf out of the room and towards the manse’s dungeon.

One thought kept playing on repeat in the lupine’s head:

_I’m screwed_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was probably the hardest chapter I've written for this series so far, though probably not for the immediately obvious reason.
> 
> Thanks as always for kudos and comments, criticism welcome.


	6. Chapter 6

# V

 

Catarina kept a wary gaze as the group of misfit criminals left her quarters – two of them now apparently in her custody.

_This week just keeps getting worse and worse_.

As the last of them left and sealed the door behind him (an unreasonably ugly aye-aye who she suspected had a drug problem), her eyes quickly turned to Melis.  Her aide had taken a great personal risk for no reason other than loyalty, and had obviously paid the price.  Her one eye was swollen shut, and there were several cuts just barely beginning to coagulate along her cheeks and forehead – doubtless carved by Leon.

The cougar’s eyes softened.  “Come here”, she told her sciurid aide – and come she did.  Even now, after all this, the squirrel still trusted her.  If Catarina had not hardened her heart to the world long ago, it might have even been emotional.

She began to scrub the cuts clean with an antiseptic wipe.  “What happened?”, she asked quietly, the vaguest suggestion of concern in her voice.

“I made contact with Star Wolf at the bar, but Leon and his crew must have followed me”.  Melis spoke hurriedly, her tone a hushed whisper.  “I’m sorry, My Lady – I didn’t realize I was being shadowed.  This is my fault.”

Catarina ignored her apology for a moment.  It was half-true: Melis deserved the blame for not realizing that damnable chameleon was tracing her; but if Catarina hadn’t hired said chameleon in the first place, then none of this might have happened.

Bringing him on was an impulse decision she’d come to regret.  He had an impeccable resumé: several high-profile assassinations, impressive military feats on behalf of the Venomian Navy during the Lylat War, instrumental presence in founding and growing that nameless, miniature criminal empire acting out of Sargasso.  Her own head of security had bagged out on her a few weeks earlier to live out a life of drug-addled partying on Aquas and she was desperate to plug the gap – Leon Powalski seemed like a godsend at the time.

But she’d rued the decision almost immediately.  The reptile insisted on having his own party of cronies tag along with him everywhere, doing his bidding and acting only nominally under her control.  They were his men through and through, but they were effective at their jobs and put the fear of God in her enemies, so she let them do as they pleased.  But she didn’t _trust_ them, not even a little bit.

That was why she sent Melis in secret by herself to cooperate with Corneria.  She was afraid Leon might have already been subverted by Baloz, and she couldn’t risk the Anglar learning about her betrayal, not if she wanted to come out of this with her head still attached to her body.

“Yes, it is – in part.  It’s also partially my fault for hiring that snake with legs to begin with.”

Melis’ expression turned into something that might be a smile, if you looked at it from exactly the right angle.  Catarina never knew her aide to be an expressive individual, which was part of the reason she trusted her with so much to begin with.

“My Lady…”, she trailed off as Catarina finished cleaning her wounds.  “…What will you do?”

It was a question the cougar had been asking herself for the last few minutes – a question she tried to put off by distracting herself with Melis’ injuries.  There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in her mind that Star Wolf was here on behalf of Corneria, which meant the LCI got her message and considered it important enough to act on.

“We need to get in contact with Wolf without Leon noticing.”  She walked back to her desk and tossed the wipes, now ruddy-brown with blood, into the garbage bin.  “I don’t know how we’re going to do that discreetly.”

“What about the defector?”

Catarina fished a package of bandages out her bottom drawer.  “I’m not sure what’s going on with the dog – worst case scenario, Leon has another gun added to his roster.”  She returned to Melis and handed her the bandages.  Catarina might be tender enough to clean her aide’s wounds, but she wasn’t coddling to the point of attaching their own bandages for them.

“My Lady”, the squirrel asked as she affixed the adhesive patches to her face.  “Might it not be best to just… do what we talked about earlier?”

Catarina grimaced.  They’d tossed around the possibility of having Leon and his team killed a while ago. 

“We still don’t know if Leon is working for Baloz or not.  If he is, offing him would be just as much an admission of guilt as him finding out I’m trying to get in with Corneria.  It’s too risky.”

Her aide nodded reticently.  “I understand, My Lady.”

Catarina’s comm-device began to vibrate.  “Damn it, now what?”  She fished it out and answered the call.  “Yes?”

“M’lady – A Mr. Hoop is here to see you”, her secretary stated a little unevenly.

Catarina frowned.  “I don’t know any…”

She put her free paw to her forehead and let it slide down her face like molasses.  “Yes.  Of course: _Mr. Hoop_.  Send him up.”

“Yes, M’lady.”

The cougar hung up with a sigh.

“Mr. Hoop?”, Melis queried.

“An old friend with a penchant for awful cover names.”  Catarina poured herself a generous serving of brandy, then turned to look at her aide – cuts and bruises and all – and decided to pour out a second one.  She handed Melis the glass, and the squirrel looked at her in confusion.

“It’s a _drink_ , Melis.  You drink it.”

“I know, My Lady.  It just seems… _imprudent_ , to be under the influence at the moment.”

The cougar smiled with chagrin.  “Now is the best time to be under the influence.”

They waited in silence for a few moments as ‘Mr. Hoop’ made his way to her quarters.  The fire was beginning to die down – she’d need to send for more wood soon – and the warm radiance of a Fichinan sunset peeking through the windows only enhanced the amber glow.  She wished she could enjoy it more, but the advent of dusk heralded the night to come, and this was a night that filled her with paralyzing fear.

Her ears perked up some as she heard her guest walk down the hall.  Melis noticed soon after her, and the squirrel turned around in her seat to face the newcomer as he walked through the door: a hound of moderate height with far too much of a self-satisfied grin plastered on his face.  He was impeccably clean, yet paradoxically unguent with a glistening, buttery veneer of grease.  He fancied himself a profoundly personable smooth-talker, but as far as Catarina was concerned, he might as well be the platonic ideal of a conman.

Unfortunately, he was also one of the few people in the Enclave she trusted.

“’Mr. Hoop’, today, is it?”, she asked with a raised eyebrow.

The hound shrugged: a too-smooth gesture that flowed like oil over water.  “I used ‘Dr. Axle’ last time – doesn’t feel right to repeat myself.”

Catarina nodded, and gestured to her aide.  “Melis, this is ‘Mr. Hoop’ – he’s a fellow member of the Enclave, one from outside the Families.”

The squirrel cautiously extended her paw, and he firmly grasped it with both of his own.  “A pleasure to meet you.  Anyone who has the trust of the esteemed Lady Illya has my trust as well.”  He leaned down and gently touched his muzzle to their entwined paws with the ghost of a kiss.

Catarina rolled her eyes.  “Enough schmoozing; it’s bad enough I have to watch you do this during meetings, I’m not going to torture myself with this during my free time.”

He released Melis’ paw and turned back towards Catarina.  “As you wish, My Lady.  Though, as busy as you are, I’m not sure this qualifies as ‘free time’”.  He shot her a smug grin.

She sighed and poured a third glass of the drink, handing it to him with an aggressive thrust.  “Who’s on their way?”, she demanded.

He raised a single finger of his paw to call for patience as he slowly downed the entire glass of brandy.  When he was finished, he let out a contended sigh.

“Well, the Petroklovs and the Bukanins of course.  The lesser Families, too.  Though they live on-planet, so that’s hardly surprising.  The Gravewells’ fleet of freighters just warped in from Zoness an hour ago, I believe.  One of my associates told me Lord Mallory is coming: first time he’s got off his ass to come himself in a long while, usually he just sends a representative.”

“Any word on Grist?”  The old boar was the biggest arms-dealer in the system, not counting the Families of course, and had butted heads with them numerous times over the years.

The hound shook his head.  “Radio silence from all my contacts.  Oh, he’s coming for sure – but he’s not taking any calls at the moment.”

Catarina gripped her glass a little tighter.  “Do you think…?”

“That Baloz got to him already and won him over to his cause?  Most likely.”

She took another careful sip, and the alcohol tasted bitter on her tongue.  “Either that, or he’s Baloz’s benefactor to begin with.”

The hound laughed that unctuous laugh of his.  “This conspiracy again?  I can’t for the life of me picture Grist the Gregarious running an operation this clandestine without it collapsing in on itself five minutes after starting it.  He’s not a man known for his subtlety.”

“Can you blame me for being paranoid at this point?”, she bit out at him.  “And maybe he taught himself subtlety over the years – people can change.”

He shrugged.  “Anything’s possible.  I still doubt it though.”

She swirled her drink around, a nervous tic more than anything else.  “If not him, then _who?_ ”

The hound’s oleaginous demeanor dried up some as he stared into the fireplace.  _At least he’s taking this somewhat seriously_ , Catarina thought.

“…I don’t know”, he responded at last.  “Baloz isn’t bluffing, I can promise you that.”  He rubbed his muzzle in worry, a more grounded expression than she’d ever seen him wear.  “In fact, I have even more bad news on that front.”

Catarina snorted.  “As if I expected anything else.”

He withdrew his comm-device from his pocket and fiddled with it for a few seconds before handing it to her.  She appreciated it for a bit before looking at whatever he wanted to show her.  “New model?”

He chuckled proudly.  “Top of the line – we’ll be debuting it publicly in a few months.”

She made a thoughtful noise in response, then began to analyze his data.

She almost wished she hadn’t.

“When did you learn about this?”

He frowned.  “Only a few days ago, right after he offed Volskov.  It gets worse: we think that’s only a _portion_ of his forces.  The rest are scattered across the hinter-zone between Lylat and Octovar.”

She scrolled through the three-dimensional system maps, the readouts of ships and weapons, a handful of intercepted transmissions.  “Where did he even get an army like this?”

The hound shrugged.  “The Octovar system’s been in a state of civil war for decades now: their status quo is one big orgy of professional mercenary armies working on-and-off jobs for this-or-that planetary prince.  It’s not unreasonable to suppose a few of these soldiers without borders be would be willing to turn coat and ally with someone from out-of-system – presuming the interloper has enough money, of course.”

Catarina sighed through her nose and returned the device to him.  “And Baloz’s benefactor clearly does – if they didn’t, and it was all a bluff, the mercs wouldn’t be mobilized to begin with.”  She began to pace.  “But who has that kind of money?”

He shook his head.  “I don’t know.”

She quit her aimless pacing and sat down at her desk, her fingers tapping against the hardwood of their own accord.  “I don’t like this.”

He laughed at that.  “Well neither do I – doesn’t change the fact it’s happening.”  His eyes met her own.  “What are you going to do?”

Now it was her turn to chuckle: a dark, defeated noise.  “My aide asked me the same thing before you arrived.”  She turned to face Melis once more, the squirrel – injured as she was – clearly primed and ready to act on whatever she asked of her.

Catarina shook her head, as if doing so would clear her thoughts.

“We don’t have a choice: we need to cut a deal with Corneria.  If Baloz is assembling a foreign mercenary army at the edge of the system, then this goes beyond the underworld.”

 

……….

 

_Drip_.

(Pause).

_Drip_.

(Pause).

_Drip_.

(Pause).

 

A chilled stillicide dripped onto the lupine’s head from the icicle hanging above him, and yet he did nothing to remove himself from the cascade, allowing the metronomic staccato of its drops gently hammer him repeatedly, like a soft-tipped mallet might strike the taught wire of a piano.  His mind was the instrument being played by the icy droplets of water, and its rhythm was a sorrowful one.

Wolf wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to indulge in self-pity as a rule – but if any time was ripe for it, then this was it.  Locked in a frozen cell buried in the depths of a Fichina Families manse, one partner injured, one partner a traitor, with no sign of backup, and no signal of possible escape.

He was well and truly fucked.  And even worse, others will well and truly fucked due to his own fucking-up.

Panther, easily the most agreeable wingman he’d ever had, shot in the shoulder and out of commission, destined to inevitably die right along with him.  Fox and the rest of Corneria, relying on him to score important intel (though he reserved some of his anger for the LCI for commissioning this fiasco to start with).

And Fay…

Wolf felt like he’d been barreled over by one of Andross’ Macbethian cargo trains back in that cougar’s lair, when she disavowed Star Wolf and took up with Leon and his crew.

Though in retrospect, maybe he should’ve seen it coming.  _City girl with a bit of a loony streak, desperate to make money, treated like shit by yours truly_ – the DNA of a betrayal was there, one catalyzed by Wolf himself if he was going to be honest about it.  He’d justified giving her a smaller cut than Panther and himself due to her being a ‘junior member’, and his little explosion on the Airgead yesterday wasn’t the first time he’d chewed her out like that (though it _was_ the first time she responded with a strike of her own; a physical one to boot).

He chuckled darkly to himself upon the realization that he’d only ever truly had one trustworthy teammate in his life, and said feline was going to end up paying the price for it right alongside him.

Wolf turned to glance at Panther’s slumped form on the other side of the cell.  He was still asleep, courtesy of the Family medic’s anesthetic.

_That was nice of him_ , Wolf had thought an hour or so ago, as the old beaver administered it right there in the dungeon.  It gave him the slightest, most fleeting kind of hope that they weren’t set to be executed – otherwise why bother take medical care of someone if you’re just going to kill them anyway?

That was when Wolf remembered the Family probably wanted him and Panther kept alive so they could torture information out of them later.

Two torture sessions in one day was a bit much for Wolf’s taste.

Still didn’t beat his personal record though.  That dubious honor went to a pride of particularly bloodthirsty lionesses who operated out of Venom.  They probably would’ve ended up killing him if it hadn’t been for –

_Leon_ , walking through the cell door accompanied by Fay, that poisonous smile of his fixed on his face.  Wolf had always disliked that smile, but over the course of the last few hours he’d come to despise it.

“Back for round two?”, the lupine asked defeatedly.

The chameleon wheezed out a laugh.  “Don’t you know it?”  He swaggered across the length of the spacious cell to a conspicuous metal-plated section of the wall.  Wolf had already tried to fruitlessly pry it open a while ago in his vain attempt to find any kind of way out, but Leon must have known the trick, because he did _something_ that caused the panel to fold out into the room – revealing a drop-down table holding a diverse array of sharp-looking instruments.

Wolf had to laugh at that: the noise coming unbidden from his throat.  “You’ve got to be kidding me”, he breathed out with a shake of his head.  It made sense, he figured.  It had to be pretty convenient to put fold-out torture tables in each cell – no need to shuffle the poor prisoners around the complex to a set-aside room.

He was pissed he hadn’t figured out how to open it though, since any weapon in there would have given him something of an advantage over his captors.

_Though maybe not_ , now that he thought about it a bit more.  What good would a little knife do against a blaster?

He lazily turned away from the spectacle of Leon eyeing up the glistening metal instruments with the look of a connoisseur to stare at Fay instead.  Her smile was back, as distant and incomprehensible as always.  He thought back to a stray realization he had during that Titania debacle: that Fay could possibly work as a replacement for Leon in the ‘threat-of-psychopath’ niche.

If only he’d realized back then what a prophetic thought that was.

“I think this one will do nicely”, the reptile declared, a knife with a wickedly-curved hook at the end of its blade in his hand.  “This specific style of dagger was developed several centuries ago by a certain noble on Katina – do you know what the hook on the end is for?”

Wolf stared at him with a deadened expression.  “Something disgusting, I bet.”

Leon grinned an open-toothed grin, and Wolf couldn’t help but notice his teeth looked sharper now than they had when they used to work together – he’d probably started filing them.

“Let’s just say you won’t need to worry about skincare as much in a few minutes.”

His mouth opened wider – scratch that earlier thought, he’d _definitely_ started filing them.

The chameleon’s comm-device started rumbling, and his smile (mercifully) closed, irritation washing across his face.  He turned aside from Wolf and drew the device with a grumble.

“I don’t appreciate being interrupted”, he snarled at whatever poor bastard rang him up.  Wolf watched the careful play of emotions on his face as whoever contacted him talked for quite a while, as vexation slowly morphed to anxiety.

“Alright – don’t wait up for me, get your asses over there pronto.  I’ll catch up.”

He hung up and turned back to Wolf with a genuinely disappointed expression, obviously distraught that he was being drawn away from his plaything for work.  “You’re a lucky one, captain.  Always have been.”  He sighed.  “We have a… _situation_ that needs taking care of.  Fay –”, he began as he turned to address her –

Only to get an iron rod to the face with an audible _crack_ , knocking him stone cold and dropping him to the floor.

Wolf watched the chameleon collapse in a heap as if it were slow-motion – and only after a few seconds of silence did it register that he was unconscious.  He lifted his gaze to see Fay standing over the reptile with a triumphant expression.

“ _What_.”

That was about the extent of what Wolf was capable of at the moment.

Fay’s smile grew in intensity.  “I knocked him out!”

“Well no shit, I can see that.  But _why?_ ”

Her smile faltered somewhat, and grew uncertain.  “To free you?”, she asked with more than a hint of confusion.  “You… you didn’t think I’d actually betray you guys… did you?”

And now her smile was gone, replaced with something close to heartbreak.  Wolf had grossly miscalculated this entire situation – his entire relationship with his newest teammate – and he needed to rectify it.

“I did”, he responded as her face fell further.

“Because I’m an idiot and an asshole.”

Now she was looking at him like he’d suddenly grown an additional pair of legs.

He took a deep breath.  “Look, I’ve been a bit of a shitty captain.  I have a lot of… _stuff…_ on my mind – a lot of baggage – and I took it out on you.  That doesn’t excuse my actions though.”  He paused.  “We should talk about this, but now isn’t the time.”

He extended his paw towards her.  “Truce?”

She hesitated for a beat before gripping it with a paw of her own, the smile returned.  “Truce.”

Wolf grinned and took a look around the cell.  “Now, how do we get out of here?”

“Oh”, Fay began.  “That’s easy – all the guards are gone because they’re busy.  That was what the call Leon answered was about: after I joined them, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and used the time to plant a bomb on the far end of the manse.  They probably think they’re under attack!”

The lupine nodded slowly.  “…Alright.  Good.  Do you have a plan for escape?”

She frowned.  “I hadn’t gotten that far.”  Her face perked up again almost instantly.  “Oh!  But before we leave, we should really go pick up Lady Illya.”

Wolf’s eyes narrowed.  “Illya?  As in _House_ Illya?  _That’s_ who has us captive!?”  The Illyas were second only to the Volskovs in the Families – first, actually, now that Nikolai was dead.  He put the realization out of mind – he needed to focus on the mission.

“We don’t need to snag her though: Corneria will take care of that, remember?  Arresting the heads of the Families is their job.”

She shook her head and began to speak at a breakneck pace.  “No, you don’t understand: Lady Illya _was_ trying to contact us.  She just lied to Leon because she didn’t trust him.  But we have to get her fast, because she’s leaving soon to go meet with the Enclave!”  She paused to take a breath.  “Oh yeah, and the guy who killed Mr. Volskov is an Anglar named Baloz, and he has a giant army ready to invade Lylat.”

Now it was Wolf’s turn to stare at her like _she’d_ grown an extra pair of legs.  “How do you know all this?”

She stuck her finger in her ear and pulled out a bite-size two-way comm.  “I dropped its twin in Lady Illya’s office – I overheard her speaking about all of this with that squirrel and some other guy!”

Wolf just stared at her in disbelief, shaking his head from side to side.

He was interrupted from his thoughts by a pained grumble emanating from elsewhere in the room.  He quickly turned on Leon for a split-second, ready to knock him out again, before he realized it was Panther.  The anesthetic was obviously starting to wear off.

“Where… am I?”, the feline asked, voice slurred and eyes half-lidded.  His lopsided gaze turned between Wolf and Fay.

“…What?”, he asked with a drawl.  Well, more of a drawl than he usually had, anyway.

“Don’t worry about it”, Wolf interjected as he hoisted Panther up and braced him against his shoulder.  “I’ll explain later, when you’re less drugged.”

Panther hummed peacefully.  “That sounds good.”

Wolf turned back to Fay, Panther now draped across his back.  “Alright, then.  Which way to Lady Illya’s quarters?”

Fay smiled eagerly.  “Follow me, _cap’n_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I banged this one out quick, but be forewarned this counts as the update for this week: the next chapter is the big action climax of this story, so it'll probably take longer to write.
> 
> Judging by the comments on the last story, everyone figured out Fay was pulling a con instantly. I'm glad you guys know I'm not the kind of writer who'll pull a nonsensical turn like that - on the incredibly unlikely off-chance someone goes full Daenerys in any of my stories, this series or otherwise, you'll be able to see it coming: I promise.
> 
> Thanks for kudos and comments as always, I'd love to hear some criticism too. See you next chapter.


	7. Chapter 7

# VI

 

“ _Alright_ ”, Wolf whispered to Fay.  “ _How do we get out of here?_ ”

The pair of canines braced themselves against the stone wall, Panther hitched on the larger lupine’s back.  The weight was starting to get to Wolf, but he couldn’t afford to think about it too much lest it finally catch up with him and cause him to collapse.

“ _There’s a stairway at the end of this hall – if we go up it’ll lead us back into the manse!_ ”  Fay held her blaster aloft, and carefully eyed the hallway.  It wasn’t necessary though – Wolf already knew no one was approaching thanks to his cybernetic eye.

He couldn’t be so certain about hidden cameras of listening devices though.

Panther stirred again on his back, still recovering from the anesthetic, and that settled it for Wolf.  He turned to Fay and shook his head.  “ _We can’t afford to get into a firefight right now, not with sleeping beauty here weighing us down_ ”, he continued to whisper.  “ _Did you notice any other options?_ ”

She chewed on her lower lip.  “… _We could take the stairs_ all _the way up – that’d put us on the roof_.”

Wolf nodded.  “ _And we reenter through another tower closer to the Lady’s quarters – it’s a plan_.”

Fay beamed at the praise and took point as they traversed the abandoned dungeon complex.  Wolf could see his breath with every exerted huff, and he had to maneuver around parts of the ground that were slick with puddles of ice.

He felt a strange sense of foreboding travel down his spine, every bit as chilling as the frozen prison surrounding him.  He shook it off to the best of his ability, and tried to keep pace with Fay as they approached the spiral staircase that would hopefully lead them to safety and the successful conclusion to their venture.

They needed to finish this mission, and fast, before the rest of the manse’s security figured out what was going on.

And it was only a matter of time before that happened.

 

……….

 

It was only a matter of time before it would happen: Catarina’s carefully curated aura of control would fall apart around her, leaving the wreckage visible to anyone who paid so much as a cursory glance.

She tried to maintain a semblance of calm sitting there in that obscenely comfortable, red velvet-lined chair amongst her colleagues, her fellow members of the Enclave.  Her erstwhile plan to spirit Wolf out of the dungeon – so that he might spirit her to safety in turn – was harpooned by that master whaler Baloz, who’d decided to arrive unannounced at her manse.

After a few moments of tense pleasantries, he’d casually informed her that the Enclave would be meeting – _now_ – at a location of his choosing.  Or rather, _she_ would be calling the meeting at his behest.  Don’t ask too many questions, of course – this is all at the will of our benefactor (‘our’ benefactor now, as if Catarina had ever chosen to align herself with these people).

So now here they were, just shy of an hour after Baloz’s impromptu declaration, damn the fact the meeting wasn’t scheduled to occur for another day and therefore everyone present was annoyed at the sudden change in plans.

They were assembled in House Illya’s ‘summer house’, an elegant building a jaunt away from the main house.  Joey, alias Mr. Hoop, sat to her immediate right, that smooth and easy countenance of his as solid as ever, though she knew him well enough to know he must have been straining to keep it in place.  He’d been there when Baloz arrived with his hammerhead bodyguards in tow – very few could stand in the presence of that particular monster and _not_ be deeply affected by him.

Corlis Bukanin sat to her left, the twitchy opossum fidgeting and playing with his empty glass, desperate for something to occupy his hands and thoughts.

Marven Grist was here of course, the boar drinking whiskey out of his hollowed-out, broken-off tusk that he’d lost in a fight decades ago.  Vega Dell out of Zoness, Monsignor Erwin, the Dadii, _both_ of the Petroklovs in attendance (a rare occurrence for the twins), Lord Liam Mallory the Exiled.  There were representatives from the lesser Families too: the Cheskovs, the Vicaks, the Andrejskis – on and on it went.  There were a handful of empty seats at the table, but all in all it was one of the more populous gatherings of the Enclave Catarina had been party to.

_Not party to_ , she reminded herself.  _I called this meeting_.

A few uncomfortable moments of near-silence passed, the assembled members of the Enclave making awkward jabs at small talk.  Very few of those present here were the type of people who liked to talk about everything and nothing – your typical lord of the underworld was not one to mince words.  It made their near-silent vigil ever more pregnant with anticipation and impatience.

Finally, Grist (as if it would be anyone else) slammed his drinking tusk on the table, shutting off whatever paltry excuses for conversation were passing between those seated.

“Alright, Catarina”, he dictated with a growl, disrespectfully calling her by her first name.  “What the hell is going on here?  You rush us all out here with no notice, and now we’re sitting around doing nothing like a bunch of jackasses.”  He turned a sideways glance to Lord Mallory.  “No offense, Liam.”

The ass nodded his head.  “None taken.”

Grist continued with a puff of his chest and a jab of his tusk towards Catarina’s end of the table, whiskey sloshing over the sides.  “So: what’s going on?  Are you ever going to call the meeting or should I leave?  I’ll have you know I’ve got important business back at my hotel – I only paid her for the one night and I don’t want to shell out another thousand credits for another.”

Sounds of vague agreement rang out across the table, and Catarina raised her paw in a placating gesture.  “I’m waiting on… a special guest, to speak.”  She glanced at the door again, something she’d been doing more and more often as Baloz continued to take his sweet time.  “He’s a bit busy at the moment.”  She knew he wasn’t, and was just doing this to put everyone on edge.

Grist grunted.  “Are we inviting just anyone to come speak at the Enclave now?  This would’ve never happened when _Nikolai_ was in charge.”  More murmured sounds of agreement.  Grist narrowed his eyes.  “In fact, whoever said _you_ get to be in charge now?  I don’t remember ever putting it to a vote.”

Catarina glared at him.  “I’m not formally in charge – I’m just running this meeting in lieu of Nikolai.  We’ll put the leadership to a vote, but not yet.  We need to listen to our speaker first.”

One of the Petroklovs (Catarina couldn’t tell which) spoke up.  “Why?”, she asked in a tremulous voice.  “Our guest is obviously wasting our time – we might as well start the meeting now that we’re all here, and vote on who should lead us.”

More sounds of assent rang out across the table when the doors at the far end of the room opened, the distorted silhouette of a broken Anglar struck in stark relief against the white field of snow behind him.  He entered the hall, every strike of his metal cane ringing against the tiled floor like a hammer on an anvil, his sphyrnid guards on either flank.

Grist rose out of his chair, his free hand hovering an inch from his blaster.  “ _You_.  I know you.”

Baloz cocked his head.  “Few don’t”, he responded with a metallic twang.  “You can put away the blaster, though.  I promise no violence will fall upon you today.”

The qualification was not lost on Catarina, but apparently this was enough to quell Grist, who fell back into his chair with a growl and a glare.  Catarina stood up to address them.

_The moment of truth_.

“Assembled members of the Enclave, I introduce to you General Baloz: former admiral of the Anglar Empire’s Left Hand Armada.”

Silence met her announcement.  Baloz was right: though his name and identity might not be common knowledge, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in Lylat unfamiliar with the Left Hand Armada.  Though she was also keenly aware the name was one ensconced in infamy rather than fame.  The fact she’d even done business with him had won her a disappointed look from Nikolai when he learned about it – and Nikolai was no stranger to dealings with dark individuals.

“And what does General Baloz have to say?”, Lord Mallory asked respectfully.

The Anglar nodded his head and took a deep breath from his life support system, the pained, hollow sound grating on Catarina just as it always did.

“Your underworld is about to face a reckoning”, he began, his non-mangled eye full of a fiery glint.  “Corneria has allowed you to operate as you have for a long time – _too_ long, in fact.  You’ve grown fat.  Weak.  Impotent.”

Catarina could see Grist’s hand tighten its hold on his drinking tusk, his knuckles turning pale.  Very few told the boar he was weak and lived to tell the tale.

“You’re one to speak”, Vega Dell interrupted, the slit pupils of her reptilian eyes fixed on Baloz.  “What great deeds have you accomplished over the last two years that give you the right to speak down to _us_ for weakness?”

The pirate queen was a Zoness girl through-and-through, and Catarina knew that meant mistrust of Anglars at best and outright revilement at worst.  The Anglar Blitz had been concentrated mostly on Lylat’s aquatic planets – and the denizens of Aquas and Zoness would not soon forget the horrors inflicted by the Anglar Emperor’s brutal Hands.

But Zoness had felt the fury of the Right Hand, led by a mostly respectable admiral.  It was Aquas that felt the blow of the Left Hand, a blow struck by Baloz – and his war crimes during the Blitz granted him a permanent spot on Corneria’s most wanted list.

Said Anglar shook his head disarmingly at Dell.  “More than you can imagine, though I doubt you’ve heard tell of them”, he rasped with that mechanical resonance of his.  “The wars in the Octovar System have kept me quite occupied.”

Grist barked out a laugh.  “ _Octovar?_   You think any of us here give two shits about that?”

“You should”, the Anglar intoned.  “The nature of war there is unlike anything in Lylat: its shape is constantly growing: _evolving_.  Soon that fluid mosaic of strike and counter-strike will grow to absorb your own system, and this pitiful status quo of enfeebled men and women enforcing a stultifying regime of complacency will end.”  His words carried a fevered edge to them.

Lord Mallory turned away from Baloz to face Catarina, his eyes full of the same sort of disappointment she once saw in Nikolai.  “Ideologues have no place in the Enclave”, he said, obviously directed at her.  “We are businessmen, not revolutionaries, or anarchists, or whatever this man happens to be.  He has no place here.”

“Here, here!”, Grist concurred with a salutatory raise of his tusk.  The exiled Cornerian Lord Liam Mallory was soft-spoken and even-keeled, and his word carried great weight amongst the members of the Enclave.  Judging by the chorus of assent rising in volume along the length of the table, virtually everyone was in agreement.

The sounds of approval were interdicted by the grinding, grating intonation of Baloz’s broken laugh, its metallic cadence piercing through the relative din and coming out the victor.  “You think you have a choice?  _Any_ of you?  The storm is coming regardless of what you do here tonight – I am merely its harbinger.”  His scarred visage panned across those seated at the table, taking each of them in turn.  “Even as you sit, Corneria makes its move.”

A hush fell upon the table like a pall.  Catarina stared down at her drink as Mallory sought her eye-contact.  She had already heard this from Baloz earlier – there was nothing to be done but let him speak.

Mallory gave up trying to seek her eyes and instead turned to Baloz.  “If you could elaborate on that?”, he asked, nothing if not polite.

Baloz’s eye glinted, and Catarina thought he might be smiling.  “The LCI has Fichina seeded with operatives – _thousands_ of them.  They are prepared to seize each and every one of you tomorrow evening at the Volskov estate, where the Enclave was set to meet.”

“Impossible”, Dell cut in as the table began to erupt in noise.  “Even if it were true, they would need to have solid proof that we committed any of the wrongs they would accuse us of doing.”

“Which they will have”, the Anglar gloated, “when the undetected viruses they’ve seeded into all of your networks over the last several years in preparation for this mission deliver them the details of every financial transaction you’ve made since the they were introduced.”  His pronouncement was met with stunned silence.  “Now do you see?  You have very few options left available to you.”

“How can you know any of this?”, Grist asked with a growl, though Catarina noticed he looked shaken.

Baloz turned that burnt-out ghost eye of his towards the boar.  “Does it matter?  If you don’t believe me, ask the esteemed Lady Illya – I’ve shown her everything.”

More bewildered whispers, and all eyes in the room fixated upon her.  She could feel the cracks in her resolve forming.  _Too late_ , she thought.  _I was too late_.

“Is it true?”, Lord Mallory asked, caution clear on his face.

She nodded.  What else could she do?  She withdrew her comm-device from her pocket and activated the holo-transmitter on the table, mirroring the image on her device.  Known LCI agents stationed all over the planet, warships waiting just outside the sector, encrypted static on Cornerian frequencies skyrocketing in frequency over the last week.  The evidence was laid bare for all of them to see.

Joey put his paw on her leg under the table, and she appreciated the comforting gesture.  The rest of those seated at the table looked stunned, caught flat-footed by the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

“…What do we do?”, one of the Petroklovs asked, though Catarina could not say if the question was rhetorical or not.

“Give your resources to me”, Baloz demanded, uncaring one way or the other.  “All of them: your finances, your records, every detail that can be traced back to you.  Arms, drugs – all of it.”  Catarina thought his eyes reflected the flames of her fireplace before she remembered there was no fire in this room.  “You said it yourselves: they cannot imprison you without cause.  Give me the power of the Enclave, and I will grant you freedom from life spent in a Cornerian prison.”

Lord Mallory slammed his fist on the table, a highly uncharacteristic action from him.  “This is an outrage!”  He turned to Catarina again, shaking his head.  “Did you do this?  Are you _with_ him?”  His eyes narrowed.  “Did you kill Volskov?”

“ _No!_ ”, she shouted, unable to hold back any longer.  “I would _never_.”

“She speaks truth”, the Anglar said.

“How can we know?”, Dell asked, arms crossed.

Baloz turned to her, and Catarina saw the iguana’s flinty resolve crack.  “Because _I_ killed him.”

Silence, followed by uproar.

Grist drew his blaster for real this time, and Lord Mallory reached under the table for his own weapon.  Baloz’s guards hefted their large arms, but the Anglar himself remained unmoved, his eyes watching the boar in amusement.

“Go ahead, boar”, Baloz dared.  “Shoot me.  Shoot me, and watch everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve crumble around you, leaving you broken and bloodied in the rubble.”

Grist’s hand began to shake, the blaster quivering with it.  His eyes were fixed on Baloz in fury, but the Anglar’s words managed to get under his skin.  Finally, his quaking ceased, and he lowered his aim.  Those seated around the table eased alongside him, and Catarina quietly let out a breath of relief.

“… _Fine_ ”, the old boar spat.  “What do you need us to do?”

Baloz straightened where he stood, as much as he could anyway.  He drew a strange-looking comm-device from the deep pockets of his overcoat – something about the way its case glimmered looked vaguely familiar to Catarina.

“My people have already done most of the legwork – your accounts, your information, all of it is ready to be transferred to me at a moment’s notice.  I hope you’ll forgive me that intrusion; it seemed prudent.”  He handed the device to Grist.  “Sign your name, and you’ll make it official.”

Mallory raised his hand in a call to pause.  “Wait.  You mean you’ve already infiltrated our servers yourself?  Why even go to the trouble of asking us for this, then?”

The Anglar watched Grist as the boar unhappily signed his name, not even deigning to face the exiled lord.  “I don’t want any bad blood between us.  Understand: I do this for you, not for myself.  My benefactor is gracious, and he promises the return of your holdings at a later date, after Corneria has been dealt with.”  He took the device back from the boar, and nodded his approval at the signature.  “You will weather this storm – all of you.  But for now, the might of the Enclave must be concentrated in more secure hands.”

“Your hands, you mean.”  The donkey didn’t take the device as Baloz handed it to him.  “Yours, or your ‘benefactor’s’.  I’m no fool, Anglar – you’re not going to take our wealth and resources and _not_ use it to your own ends.”

Baloz turned his head to the side slightly, as if trying to appraise Mallory from another angle to better understand him.  “And what if I do?  All will be repaid eventually, and for now you all get to remain free to pursue your own lives and livelihoods.  A fair deal, I believe.”

The lord stared at Baloz’s device like it was a cursed item; and in a way, it was.  He looked to Catarina one more time, and she finally reneged and looked him in the eye, her discomfort plain as day.

He sighed through his nostrils, and took the proffered device.  “I don’t like making deals with the devil”, he quietly intoned as he signed his name away.

Baloz nodded respectfully.  “No one does”, he told the lord with an air of cautious regard.  “But today, the devil brings you salvation.”

 

……….

 

Frigid gusts of wind buffeted Wolf as he carefully made his way along the slick, ice-coated eaves of Manse Illya, the feline on his back getting heavier with every successive step forward.

He could barely see ten feet in front of him – the blizzard had kicked up seemingly out of nowhere (as storms were wont to do on Fichina), and more than once he was afraid he’d fall right over the edge.  Why the Illyas had went to the trouble of building a rooftop walkway and _not_ built any guardrails or even really tried to make it traversable in any meaningful capacity was a question he asked and re-asked himself every time his boot almost slipped out from under him on another puddle of ice that had probably been frozen solid ever since the palatial residence was built in the first place.

Fay had an easier go of it, sticking in front of him and directing their steps.  Supposedly she knew where she was headed – a tower on the other end of the roof that would lead them right to Lady Illya’s quarters – but it was slow going.

A hole in the storm opened up in the sky out to Wolf’s right: a small, fleeting thing that gave him a glimpse of the bright stars and aurorae beyond.  Just as soon as he’d glimpsed it, it had collapsed, the clouds once more conspiring to choke out what little bit of light he could see.

He trudged on regardless, making sure not to jostle Panther too much, and continued to cautiously traverse the length of the manse.

After a few minutes, Fay came to a stop.  Wolf looked up, and saw why: a thick wooden door barred with iron grating stood nestled into a high-steepled turret.

_Finally_ , Wolf thought.  “This is it, right?”

Fay shot him a nod, and he awkwardly moved Panther to rest more on his left shoulder as he drew his blaster.  Fay drew her own, and they both started firing on the door.  Wolf concentrated on shooting out the iron grate protecting it, but Fay just blasted the thing to bits at random.

After they ceased fire, he marched up to the door with the intent of opening it – instead, it collapsed in on itself with a shove of his paw.  He turned back to face Fay, and she shrugged in response.  The ghost of a smile on his muzzle, he passed into the vestibule beyond, eager to put the blizzard behind him.

Wolf and Fay made their way down the tower’s spiral staircase quietly, blasters held aloft.  They both knew that danger lurked ahead, though they couldn’t know in what capacity.

_Get in, get the Lady, get out_.  Wolf played the mantra on repeat in his head.  He really hoped their client had a plan to exit the manse, cause hell if he had one.

The bottom of the staircase led to a hallway lined with old suits of armor – the same ones Wolf remembered leading to Illya’s quarters.  He let Fay take point, seeing as she apparently knew the layout better than him.

Minutes passed as they approached the cougar’s den, each one more nerve-wracking than the last.

_Why haven’t they figured out we’re on the loose yet?_ Wolf should’ve been happy they hadn’t faced any resistance yet, and in a way he was, but it was starting to psych him out.  Fay’s little bomb distraction was a while ago – surely they must have realized what was going on by this point?

Wolf’s optimistic side hoped that Lady Illya had come through – that she’d figured out who on her team was untrustworthy and did away with them, and was waiting peacefully for Wolf to arrive so he could bring her to Corneria.  But his realistic thing countered with the idea that something bad must have gone down; something seriously distracting enough to pull anyone who _should_ be looking for runaway captives away from their stations.  Was Fay’s bomb enough for that?

They reached the large double doors to the Lady’s quarters.  Wolf looked to Fay and raised his right paw, three fingers held up.  She nodded her understanding (at least he hoped it was that) and began to count down with his fingers.  On the last one, they both shoved the doors open, Fay pushing and Wolf kicking, her holding her blaster aloft, ready to provide cover fire if anyone dangerous was on the other side.

Instead, they found the squirrel Leon had tortured earlier, sitting calmly on a stool in the middle of the room, as if she’d been waiting for them.

“You’re too late”, she told them with a mournful shake of her head.  “Baloz has already taken her.”

Wolf grimaced as Fay surreptiously closed the doors behind her.  He figured they could speak freely in here – what were the odds a crime lord would bug their own room?

“What happened?”, he asked gruffly.

The squirrel frowned.  “’What _is_ happening?’, is the question you should be asking.”  She slid off the stool with a pained expression and stood up.  “She was planning to free you, as I’m sure you’ve already surmised seeing as you came back here instead of escaping.”  Her brow furrowed.  “How did you know?”

Wolf cocked his head towards Fay.  “Ask her.”

Fay turned to the squirrel and answered smugly.  “I dropped a two-way comm-device in the room.”

The aide nodded slowly.  “Resourceful”.  Wolf supposed it was a compliment, but the squirrel’s demeanor was so staid it was hard to tell.  “But ultimately pointless.  Baloz must have known she was planning to betray him somehow – he arrived shortly after you were sent to the dungeon, and strong-armed the Lady into calling the Enclave to an early meeting.  They’re assembled in the Lady’s summer-house as we speak.”

The gears in Wolf’s mind began to turn.  “Now?  As in _right_ now?”  As the squirrel nodded, he reached for the comm-device he stole off of Leon’s unconscious body.

“I trust you have a plan?”, the squirrel asked cautiously.

Wolf shot her a lopsided, dangerous grin.  “No – but I know people who do.”

 

……….

 

His eyes were open, though it made little difference.  The space was dark, cold, and cramped; it felt like he was entombed inside of a metal box.

He knew exactly where he was, and he was none too happy about it.

Deft fingers reached for a comm-device that wasn’t there, because of course it wasn’t.  Wolf wasn’t _that_ much of an idiot as to leave him such an obvious means of escape.  Not any more idiotic than himself anyway, trusting that literal bitch.  His emotions had gotten the better of him when he took her on – something that rarely ever happened, and only seemed to happen when the damnable lupine was involved.

He traced the contours of his containment, searching for the latch he knew was hidden there, though he doubted the architects ever had this particular scenario in mind when designing the room.  At least Wolf had the courtesy of tossing out all the torture devices – he’d hate to roll over in his unconsciousness and get a shank to the side.

_Ah!_   And there it was: he pressed onto the latch and the foldout table forcefully opened back into the dungeon, pushed by his weight, unceremoniously dumping him out onto the cold stone floor beyond.

He stood up with a groan and walked out into the hallway outside the cell, equal parts unsurprised to see Wolf and his compatriots had escaped, and actually surprised to see no sign of a struggle.  Where were the guards?  Where were his men?

The chameleon walked over to a false stone panel he knew hid a manse-wide comm system and pulled it aside.  He drew the archaic device from its holster and dialed his crew.  An unusually long amount of time passed before someone finally picked up.

“Yeah?”  It was Jax, sounding stressed-out, something the reptile didn’t associate with the rooster as a rule.

“It’s me – what the hell is going on?”

“ _Boss!_ ”, the avian yelled into his end, causing Leon to reflexively move the device further from his face.  “Am I glad to hear you!  Things are tense over here.  Where have you been?”

The lizard felt an unbidden expression of disbelief crawl up his face.  “Where have _I_ been?  _Where have_ you _been!?_ I just spent the last god-knows-how-long trapped inside a fold-out torture table in the dungeons.  O’Donnell and his friends _escaped!_ ”

The rooster remained silent for a beat as Leon impatiently tapped his foot.  “…Oh man”, he responded at length.

“I want a sitrep.”  Leon didn’t have time for the birdbrain’s bird-brain to catch up.

“Yeah, yeah – of course.  Uh…”  Leon slapped his face with his free hand as Jax stumbled.  “Well, a bomb went off in the troop quarters, so we pulled everyone off to investigate and find the intruder.  Then that guy arrived, the Anglar – the one with the fucked-up face?”

“General Baloz, yes.”  Leon didn’t know too much about the former admiral of the Anglar Empire; no more than anyone else did, anyway.  “What happened?  Did he set the bomb?”

“We don’t know – but right after he showed up, Lady Illya called the Enclave to meet.  They’re still at her summer-house.”

Leon frowned – that didn’t seem right.  “Is that where you are?  Providing security?”

“No, we’re still in the manse.  The Lady didn’t want us with her.”  That seemed even less right.  “But we’ve got another problem now – someone sent a long-distance comm from the manse a few minutes ago.  Like, a _big_ one.”

“… _So?_ ”

“It was sent from your device.”

The wheels turned quickly in Leon’s mind – they always did.  “Fuck – it’s Wolf.”  He quickly went down the list of variables, trying to parcel out what was happening as quickly as possible.  “He’s probably calling in Corneria to capture the Lady.  We need to get him.  _Now_.”

“O-of course, sir.”

“I want all of you mobilized this instant – they don’t leave this manse.  I’m on my way.”

“Got it.”  And with that, the rooster hung up.

Leon knew something was up.  None of this was adding up quite perfectly.  Wolf was obviously in cahoots with Corneria – but why was he after Lady Illya, specifically?  Was Baloz in league with him?

He shook his head and sped down the corridor.  He’d have time to figure this out later.

For now, he had a wolf to hunt.

 

……….

 

Her personal quarters in the summer house were a far cry from those in the manse proper.  Whereas her rooms in the manse were simple and austere – cold, really – the summer house’s personal living space was designed to appear warm, airy, and intricately detailed, bas reliefs of grapevines and flowering trees carved into the white, wooden walls.

It was all for naught though, considering the frigid temperature of the ‘summer house’.  Catarina couldn’t decide if her particular forebear who designed the building had a spectacular sense of irony, or if they were completely and utterly delusional.

The only thing warm about the room was the mulled cider, delivered by a flawlessly-adorned servant to her and her guests.

She was trying her best to look relaxed while sitting on the small lounge chair, Joey standing somewhat awkwardly off to her side, both of them with glasses of the drink in hand.  Baloz opted to stand across from them, his guards (mercifully) nowhere to be seen, having opted instead to stand outside the door.

Catarina didn’t know what to think at this point.  Her plan went up in smoke the second Baloz stormed into her quarters and decided the Enclave would meet early.  She could still see the smoldering ruins of it in her mind’s eye.  All she could do at this point was try and hide the evidence that she had ever considered double-crossing him.

Because how could she?  For all intents and purposes, Baloz _was_ the Enclave now – and one doesn’t screw over the Enclave without paying the price.

Her placid countenance betrayed the anxiety bubbling up beneath.  She needed to have Wolf and his team killed off posthaste, even the dog who betrayed him.  They were a loose end that she couldn’t afford to have tracked back to her.  Joey was a member of the Enclave and had signed over his copious resources to Baloz with the rest; he wouldn’t be scrutinized.  Melis was safe too, she thought – the squirrel would never break.

She didn’t know what to do about Leon and his detestable crew.  She was all but certain it was the chameleon who crossed her, which meant she was right all along, and he was one of Baloz’s plants.  But that added another wrinkle – was there even any point in tying up (and cutting off) the loose ends if Baloz already knew about them?

“I’m disappointed in you, Lady Illya.”

_Speak of the devil_ , she thought as the Anglar’s distorted utterance rang out.  And Liam was right about that: Baloz _was_ a devil.  Here was the moment of truth.  The question was whether or not she’d survive it.  She drew her head high.  “Why?  Have I not done everything you’ve asked of me?”

Baloz shifted in place, keeping his weight steady on his cane.  “Yes, but you also sought to betray me.  For this, there must be punishment.”

She laughed.  Damn her, she laughed.  In a twisted sort of way, it felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.  _Of course_ Baloz knew about her plan, and of course she’d pay the price for it.  No point stressing herself out, now that it was all out in the open.  “Powalski was acting as a pair of eyes for you, wasn’t he?”

She didn’t expect the vacant stare she got in response from him.  “Who?”, he asked, and for the life of her she couldn’t detect any falsity about the question.

“My head of security: Leon Powalski, the chameleon”, she continued, as if this would jog his memory.  In the back of her mind, burgeoning in a dark corner of her unconscious, she was beginning to realize she’d been wrong.  The Anglar shook his head, confirming it.

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

She felt like she was being strangled, like a shadowy claw had gripped her throat.  _If not Leon, then_ …

The hound standing to her right cleared his throat.

It hit her like a freight train.  For a few seconds she simply stared forward, refusing to turn to her side, as if by not looking upon it she would deny the truth’s existence.  Finally she could bear it no longer, and turned to make eye contact with her compatriot.  Her trusted ally in the Enclave.  Her friend, who was obviously a friend no longer, and perhaps never had been.

He had the good grace to look ashamed about it, at least.

She measured him then, in a way she never really had.  Joey’s position in the Enclave had always been a strange one, considering his line of work.  He always stayed out of the fights and internecine struggles between the Families and their partners, acting as something of a mediatory body.  Catarina had come to rely on the stability a relative outsider brought to the table.  She was now coming to regret that reliance.

“I trusted you.”  It was all she could say – all she could think.

He looked like he was about to speak when Baloz rasped another of his horrible, metallic breaths and spoke instead.  “And that was a mistake, My Lady.  You men and women of business are all alike: easily corruptible, easily subverted.  The siren call of money sways even the best among you.”

The hound, now thoroughly cowed, looked Catarina in the eye.  “I’m sorry, Cat.”

She shook her head.  “It’s business.  I know it’s nothing personal.”  More than a small part of her wished it had been, though.  It was so _cold_ this way.  It always was on Fichina.

“If it weren’t for your friend here, we never could have infiltrated the Enclave’s systems like we did.”  The Anglar sounded proud, Catarina noticed.  “We never could have infiltrated _Corneria_ like we did.  The connections he provided us were invaluable.”

She nodded.  It was all very reasonable – very _rational_.  Which made it hurt all the more.

Baloz went silent for a moment, appraising the situation.  “I was planning to kill for your treachery, but your friend dissuaded me.  He was even willing to refuse the entirety of his payment to secure your life.”

Catarina’s gaze shot to Joey again, and this time he looked less guilty.

“And, I’m willing to… _consider_ this, to give you another chance.  But you must do something for me, first, if you are to survive.”

The cougar nodded.  She didn’t know whether she wanted to slap Joey or kiss him, but she nodded.

“Corneria cannot know what transpired here today”, the Anglar said, voice brimming with a cold sort of fury.  “Kill the wolf.”

 

……….

 

Wolf paced himself as he jogged down the hallway, Panther still draped across his shoulders, breathing in and out with every step.  He hadn’t endured carrying weight like this for such an extended period of time in years, not since a particularly awful mission on Macbeth back in his Venomian Navy days, and it was starting to catch up with him.

He and Fay were both flanking the squirrel – Melis, her name was – as she led them to the nearest hangar bay, where they’d find a means of quickly crossing the distance to the summer house.  She hadn’t been happy about Wolf’s plan, but she conceded it was the best option available to them at this point.  If they were going to save the Lady, it was time to do or die.

“It’s just around the corner – we’re almost there”, Melis told them with a quick glance behind – and then suddenly stumbled over herself and fell as a blaster bolt seared across the length of the hall and took her square in the gut.

Fay squeaked in surprise as Wolf yanked her by the collar of her jacket and pulled her flat against the wall alongside him, just around the corner from the hallway beyond – though he couldn’t say if her reaction was because he pulled her or because their ally had just been shot.

Wolf squatted to the ground, gently depositing Panther on the floor and leaning him against the wall, drawing his blaster in a practiced, fluid motion.  He glanced at the squirrel, who’d managed to sit back up in a haze only to get another shot in the chest, her face mercifully turned away from his and Fay’s by the impact.  He didn’t think she’d be getting up from that one.

“Come out, Wolf!  I know you’re out there”, a familiar and decidedly unwelcome voice echoed across the hall.  How in the seven hells Leon managed to escape was something he’d undoubtedly ask himself after the mission, assuming he survived until then.

There wasn’t any point in pretending he wasn’t there – he was sure the lizard already saw him when he pulled Fay aside.  “So what if I am?”, he called out from his position.  He sidled along the length of the wall and set his cybernetic eye to infrared: there was Leon, along with the rest of his gang, standing in the middle of the hall without a care in the world, not even bothering to take cover behind anything.

The chameleon’s cruel laugh echoed out across the hall.  “You can’t wait forever, Wolf – you’re only prolonging the inevitable.”

The lupine growled.  “Why don’t you be a real man and get your scaly ass over here yourself?”  He knew the challenge would go unanswered; Leon wasn’t stupid enough to waltz over to where Wolf could shoot him.  No, the reptile would patiently stay hunkered down exactly where he was, waiting for backup to arrive.

Wolf’s eyes darted around the hallway, his gaze landing on anything and everything, looking for some kind of tactical advantage.  The walls, the floor.

_The ceiling_.

Wolf noticed a metal grate leading into the ventilation system directly above him.  He sidled along the length of the wall and peeked out beyond the corner for just a second – darting back not a second too soon as a blaster shot scorched the portion of the wall his muzzle had just occupied, taking a chunk out of the masonry.  It didn’t matter though: he’d been able to confirm his suspicion.

“Getting antsy there, _captain?_ ”, Leon’s snide voice chided, but Wolf ignored it.  He signaled Fay over with his paw and pantomimed getting down on all fours.  Most animals would gape at him like he had lost his mind if he did that – but not Fay.  She went down on her paws and knees and gave Wolf a salute.  Whether or not she actually understood his plan, he couldn’t be sure.  He gingerly stepped onto her back, and though she strained under the weight she managed to hold firm.  He signaled her to stand up, hoping beyond hope she’d actually be able to do it – and _yes_ , she could, if just barely.  Wolf used the vantage to reach the grate and pop it up and out, counting himself incredibly lucky it wasn’t sealed tight.  He scrambled off of her shoulders and into the ventilation shaft, trying to make as little noise as possible while doing so.

He could hear Leon continue to rant from beneath him as he army-crawled through the vent.  “This is a real shame, Wolf.  You used to be brave.  Dumb, yes – but courageous nonetheless.  This kind of cowardice is unbecoming.”  Wolf ignored him as he silently crossed the distance of the shaft and reached the grate he spied earlier: one that opened down into the hall behind Leon and his crew.

He kicked it open and fell to the stone floor of the hall with a sound like thunder, firing off a series of shots into the torso of a stunned water buffalo who turned to face him as soon as he landed.  He didn’t even wait for the rest of them to realize what had happened before darting behind a corner that veered off into another hall behind him.

“ _Shoot him, you idiots_!”  It took them a few seconds to register Leon’s order, at which point they started blanketing the angle protecting Wolf in laser fire.  He heard one of them let out a pained grunt as fire started to erupt from the other end of the hallway – Fay must have figured out what was going on, because she’d started shooting at them from her position.

Wolf was a little sad he didn’t get to see Leon’s face when the lizard realized he was outflanked and pinned down in an open space with no cover.  He dared another peek around the corner, and managed to get off a few potshots that went wild before returning to his position.

Leon practically growled.  “Enough of this”, he spat before Wolf heard something detonate with a _whoosh_.  He knew what it was without even having to see its effects – smoke-bombs were always a favored item in Leon’s arsenal.  For a split-second he grinned, thinking the chameleon just delivered victory to him on a silver platter.  None of them could see in infrared, after all.  His smile quickly evaporated as his implant began to go haywire though.  Apparently Leon added a little extra surprise to his bombs – Wolf guessed it was a low-grade EMP.  Now the playing field was evened.

Wolf stayed glued to his corner, straining his sensitive canine ears and nose to detect movement in the mist his eyes couldn’t.  He heard someone approach, the staccato click of talons on slate.  He rushed forward and rammed the interloper with his shoulder, forcing all the air out of the rooster’s lungs.  The avian brought his blaster up to retaliate, but not before Wolf shoved his own up through the bird’s jacket and buried the muzzle to his chest, firing point-blank.  He hoped that would muffle his shot enough to keep the sound from alerting anyone, but he couldn’t be sure it worked.

He gently laid the rooster’s body to the ground to avoid making any noise, and continued to move slowly through the fog, blaster primed and ready to fire.  Shots rang out off to his left, the streaking bolts of blue and red lighting up the smoke like a rave, and he heard a pained male screech.  _Good_ , he thought.  _As long as none of them get Fay_.

As he took another step, he felt the barrel of a blaster poke the back of his head.

“ _Got you_ ”.  Wolf could practically hear the lizard’s grin.  “Any last words, captain?”

The lupine tensed as he began to run through the variables, struggling to figure out something to get him out of this one, but he was out of smart ideas.

Maybe it was time for a dumb one, then.

“Sorry about your toe.”

He waited for a split-second before taking a forceful step back with his right leg and smashing his boot down on Leon’s own, eliciting a gasp of pain from the chameleon and a shocked window of hesitation just long enough for him to turn around and slug him in the face.  Wolf capitalized on Leon’s momentary weakness to rip the chameleon’s blaster from his own hands and throw it across the room.  He trained his own blaster directly at Leon’s face.

“And about the gun.”

Leon stood there flabbergasted for a few seconds as the smoke began to dissipate.  As it cleared out, Wolf could make out Fay standing somewhere further down the hall, Panther finally awake and leaning on her for support.  Leon’s crew laid dead, strewn around the stone floor.  The chameleon started to laugh.

“Well, then.  I suppose this is it.”  Wolf thought he sounded surprisingly even-keel for someone who thought he was about to get a blast to the brain.  “Well-played, captain.”

Wolf pistol-whipped him up his snout, causing him to stagger.  Leon began to reproach him when Wolf grabbed both his wrists and shackled them with the same type of electromagnetic manacles the lizard had him in earlier that day.

“I’m not killing you, you idiot.  You’re coming with us.”

Leon somehow looked more indignant at the idea of being captured than being killed.  “Why?”

Wolf narrowed his eyes at him.  “Why do you think, numbskull?  Corneria’s going to want info on this Baloz guy, especially from someone who works for him.  They’ll pay top dollar for your hide.”

The lizard stared at him calculatingly for a moment before his expression morphed into a wicked grin.  “Well, don’t we all look foolish?”  He began to chuckle – Wolf hated it when he chuckled.  “I must admit, I didn’t expect this.”  He sounded excited at the prospect.

Wolf stared him down.  “Explain.”

Leon’s grin increased in intensity.  “I’m not working for Baloz, Wolf.  In fact, I thought _you_ were working for him.”

Wolf knew Leon to be many things, but a liar was not one of them.  “We’re with Corneria.  Lady Illya wanted to strike a deal with us.”

The reptile’s grin faltered somewhat.  “Then why did she… _oh_.”  It returned, along with a half-manic, half-disbelieving laugh.  “ _She_ thought I was with him, didn’t she?  Oh, that dumb bitch.”  He continued to chuckle.  “Well, she was right not to trust me – I’m taking orders from House Petroklov.  The twins wanted me to depose the Illyas from the inside.”

Wolf growled.  “We don’t have time for this.”  He yanked on Leon’s manacles, pulling the chameleon along behind him.  “We need to get to the summer house and bust the Lady out of there.”  He turned back to eye Leon.  “Afterwards, I might just hand you over to her instead of Corneria.  I’m sure she’ll be glad to have the head of the man who offed her favorite aide.”  He gestured back to Melis’ corpse, laying among the others.

Except it wasn’t there.

He was torn from his confusion when Leon shook his head slowly.  “Why do you do this, Wolf?  Try to play-act the hero like this?  You’re not fooling anyone besides yourself.”

The lupine pulled the chameleon right to his face with a snarl, violet eye burning.  “Why do you do _this_ , Leon?  Try your best to make me want to rip your head off, right here and now?”

The reptile smiled, eyes glowing.  “Looks like I plucked a nerve.”

Wolf weighed the pros and cons of killing Leon out of hand when Fay approached, Panther hobbling along beside her.  “Cap’n, you might want to hear this.”  She held a comm-device aloft – she must have liberated it from one of Leon’s dead crewmembers.  It was playing a stock message on repeat.

“ _This is Lady Illya, calling to all security personnel – there has been a breach in the manse, I repeat, a breach.  All personnel are hereby ordered to hunt down Wolf O’Donnell of Star Wolf, along with his comrades.  Shoot to kill_.”  Holo-images of Wolf, Panther and Fay floated alongside the message, slowly rotating.

Leon sniggered, and Wolf tried to tune him out.  Panther spoke up, his voice still somewhat uneasy from the anesthetic.  “Captain… if she’s decided to order us killed…”

“Then we’re done here”, Wolf spat.  “We’re getting out while we still can.”  Panther and Fay both nodded, resolve clear on their faces.  The answer came easy to him – survival above all else.

“Another failure to add to the list, Wolf?”, Leon asked far too smugly for someone in his position, Wolf thought.

The lupine turned to him with an exceptionally dangerous grin, the kind he saved for those he _really_ hated.  “Well, we’re not going back to Corneria empty-handed anyway.”  He let his words sink in so the chameleon could really understand their full import.  “I wonder if the LCI likes to employ any of the tricks you do when they interrogate their captives?”, he casually put out.

Leon glared at him.  “You won’t even survive to make it back.  Corneria’s in no position to help you.”

Fay couldn’t help the knowing smile from growing on her face, though Panther looked confused – naturally, as he’d been asleep for most of the action.  Wolf drew Leon’s comm-device from his pocket and shook it for effect.  “Corneria’s about to bring the hammer down in… twenty minutes, give or take.  I told them the Enclave was meeting early and they moved up their timetable.  This whole place is going to be swarming with feds in a bit.  Now,” he yanked Leon’s manacles again, pulling the lizard along with him as he walked down the hall.  “Let’s get to the hangar, and get the hell out of here.”

 

……….

 

Catarina steadied her paw as she took in the influx of information, willing it to quell its shaking as it gripped her glass, her third drink in the last half-hour.  Wolf still hadn’t been found, no one on her security team was answering her comms, and a Cornerian warship had just emerged from warp.

They would be congregating on her manse soon, she knew.  They wouldn’t find her though, as she’d been moved off-site by Baloz and his mercs along with Joey.  The Anglar opted to leave as quietly as possible, making sure not to alert any other members of the Enclave of their departure.  “Corneria won’t be able to hold them for long”, he had said with such a self-assured tone.  “Their actions will all be for naught.”

Now they waited in this shell of a bunker a few clicks out from her manse, somewhere Baloz promised the LCI wouldn’t be able to detect them.  How he planned on managing that, Catarina didn’t know.  She was beginning to understand she’d been caught up in something far larger than a simple underworld war.  She would probably die today; die for reasons she’d never understand.  A sacrificed pawn in a grand game orchestrated by players she’d never meet.  The fact that Joey of all people was more informed on the game’s stakes than herself rankled – the fact he’d played her at _all_ rankled.

The hound stood off on his own in the little bunker, paws laced behind his back, his face turned away from her.  Baloz gave her no such space, hovering behind her, the phantoms of his pained rasps echoing through her inner ear.

Her comm-device lit up – someone had found something.  _Finally_ , she thought as she opened up the holo-still sent by one of her underlings, revealing a hangar bay relieved of three speeders.  She frowned.  “They’ve escaped”, she said emotionlessly.

“To where?”, the Anglar queried, more to prompt her mental faculties than to actually ask the question, she thought.  Joey turned to face her, something close to desperation written plain on his face.

Catarina drew a deep breath, paying close attention to how it felt to breathe, how it felt to be alive.  “They must be heading for their ships – I asked them to meet Melis at the town down the hill from my manse, they most likely landed there.”

Baloz nodded.  “Good.  _Very_ good.  You might survive this day yet.”  He activated a device of his own, displaying a crude facsimile of Fichina’s atmosphere and the space immediately around it, various ships marked as different symbols dependent on their class and size.  He skimmed his hand over a few of the still symbols, and they began to glow.  “My drones are on standby.”

Catarina eyed the holo-map, and those three violet arrows marked by Baloz specifically.  “Can they take on starfighters?  Wolf and his team are piloting Wolfens.”

Baloz shook his head, and she could hear the water in his breathing apparatus slosh along with him.  “No, certainly not against pilots as accomplished as Star Wolf.  However…” He began to eye the map himself.  “Wolfens aren’t capable of warp.  One of these ships up here is their home – it should be dispatched easily enough.”

She carefully took another breath, and nodded.  “We’ll wait for their fighters to reach the ship, and blow it up with them inside.”

Once more, she could have sworn Baloz’s eyes were glinting with a smile.  “Precisely.”

 

……….

 

Wolf reached the edge of the defunct mining town with a breath of relief – they’d managed to avoid any opposition on their stolen speeders, the assembled Families’ security more concerned with the sudden arrival of Cornerian forces than two hovercraft flooring it at breakneck pace.  He wanted to get out of dodge as quick as possible – when the LCI started going toe-to-toe with the Families, this whole place was going to light up like the night sky on Founder’s Day.

He dismounted his speeder and forcefully dragged his passenger off along with him, uncaring about the reptile’s bitching and moaning and all-too-eager to speed this process up as much as possible.  Fay disembarked her own, and helped Panther off much more carefully than Wolf had Leon.

“See, now that’s how you treat your – _ow!_ ”  Wolf hadn’t let the detestable lizard finish his sentence before slapping him.  “Quiet”, he said in monotone.  He thought he’d seen something dart through the shadows around the edge of the hangar, skulking around the fighter with the gaudy flames painted on its nose.

“Come out – I know you’re there!”, he called out, tossing Leon to the ground and drawing his blaster, already halfway to taking cover behind some rusted-out containers.  Fay and Panther got the memo, drawing their own guns (Panther a little slowly), when someone stepped out from the darkness.

Wolf eyed her warily.  “Could’ve sworn I saw you shot dead a little while ago.”

The red squirrel inclined her head.  “Laser-proof vest.”  She walked with a limp, obviously struggling.  “Doesn’t stop the force of impact though – I’m internally bleeding.”

Leon laughed.  “She’s a dead woman walking”.  Wolf kicked him in the side, eliciting another grunt of pain from the lizard.

The lupine slowly lowered his gun.  “How did you get here?  You must have left after us.”

Wolf thought she might have almost smiled, but he couldn’t be sure.  “Tunnels.  You took the long way out.”

He continued to eye her.  “Good to see you’re alive, but we’ve got to be going –”

“You’re going to die if you get in those ships”, she interrupted.  “Baloz is waiting for you to board your home-ship, then he’ll take it out.”

“How do you know this?”

She drew her comm-device, and the action caused her to cough.  Wolf couldn’t help but notice the droplets of blood along with it, and felt his resolve soften.  “I… overheard her”, she stammered through the coughs.

Wolf holstered his blaster, and Fay and Panther followed suit.  “I thought you were loyal to her?”

“I still am”, she said.  “But Baloz has her.  She is his now.”

Wolf nodded slowly.  “Alright.”  He looked over the expanse of the hangar.  “We’re still getting out of here”.  He turned his gaze to the squirrel, shaking as she stood.  “And you’re coming with us.”

 

……….

 

Her manse was in flames.  She didn’t need to see it to know the truth – she could hear the explosions, the firebombs, the thrumming blast of lasers.  Here she sat, deep in the heart of the mountain, while her home was scorched and ruined.

She hoped some of her better aides managed to make it out alive.  Melis, of course.  Tomas, the best cook on Fichina as far as she was concerned.  Emilie, Kyle – even that timid secretary of hers whose name she could never recall.

“They’re airborne”, Joey said with the clinical air of a doctor performing a critical procedure.  And he was right – three crimson starfighter arrows on Baloz’s map rose from the hangar.

Baloz watched the arrows hungrily.  “My drones will follow them.  When they board their ship, they will die.”

Catarina waited impatiently as the arrows slowly converged on a single larger box.  “That’d be the home-ship”, Joey unhelpfully supplied.  He was always prone to stating the obvious when he was stressed.

She absentmindedly noticed a grey-green box emerging from roughly the same coordinates as the Wolfens when Baloz handed his device to her.  “Activate it”, he urged.  “When the fighters land on their ship, press the button.  Kill Star Wolf, and redeem yourself.”  She turned to glance at Joey, and he nodded.

Taking a deep breath to concentrate, she watched as those arrows continued to press forward, the drones flying behind them like beasts stalking their unaware prey.  Catarina watched as the arrows fused with the box to become one, and pressed the button.  The drone-symbols flashed, indicating they fired…

…and the red box was no more.

She exhaled raggedly, Joey alongside her, and she didn’t stop him when he put his paw on her shoulder in relief.

Baloz nodded.  “Excellent.  Corneria may invade, they may even destroy everything in their path, but they will never discover what Star Wolf might have learned today.”  He turned his gaze towards Catarina, his ghost-eye glistening in the half-light of the room.  “Now there is only one loose end left to tie.”

He drew a blaster from his coat and trained it on her.  She froze as her eyes trailed the gun from its muzzle, up the length of its barrel, all the way up to the Anglar’s eye fixed on her.  She felt Joey’s grip on her shoulder tighten.

“Y-you promised…!”

Baloz’s eyes broke contact with her own, fixing on the hound behind her.  “I did no such thing.”

At that, she felt Joey’s grip grow even stronger, and the spasm of a silent cry erupt through his body and down his arm, flowing into her own.

The Anglar turned back to her, and in his eyes she saw everything, and she understood – understood that this wasn’t her story, and it never had been.  Baloz looked almost apologetic as he spoke one last time.

“The _sus padre_ sends his regards.”

A flash, and then darkness.

 

 

 

 

……….

 

 

 

 

Wolf watched in silence, transfixed, as his home exploded in a ball of fire.

He’d decided to commandeer the graffiti-tagged freighter back in the hangar after Melis’ warning and remote-order their Wolfens to fly to the Airgead.  They were gone now too, he realized – along with everything else.  He couldn’t take his eyes away from the sight of watching everything they owned go up in flames, strewn across the wide expanse of space.

Panther stood alongside him, even though Wolf had ordered him not to.  The feline still should’ve been laying down, but damn if he ever followed orders.  Wolf was grateful for the company though.

“…It’s just stuff”, the cat said quietly.  “It can be replaced.”

Wolf’s expression stayed steadfast.  “The memories can’t.”

They kept their vigil for another few moments, watching the wreckage of the Airgead float through the void, set against the backdrop of Cornerian frigates and battle-cruisers warping in from out-of-system, their starfighters engaging in dogfights with the locals.  He figured some of the Families must have refused to surrender.

“Do you know where I got it?  The Airgead, I mean.”  Panther shook his head, and Wolf continued.  “It was my dad’s – it was the ship he flew when he was exiled.  It was just… _sitting there_ , for years after he left.  I picked it up after the Lylat War ended, decided to use it as Star Wolf’s home ship.”  He finally turned from the window, nothing left to see.  “Now it’s gone.”

Panther kept his eye contact steady.  “But we remain.”

“…Yeah”, Wolf said with a forced smile, turning back once more to look at the empty space where his home used to be.

“We remain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost at the end of this story - next chapter is resolution.
> 
> Thanks for kudos and comments, criticism welcome.


	8. Chapter 8

# VII

 

A lonely lamp hung overhead – one of those old models that wasn’t even properly affixed to the ceiling, hanging by a cord and dangling down into the room, casting its dim half-light across the features of the compartment’s lone inhabitant: a downcast chameleon.

His expression perked up as the lupine entered through the ill-taken-care-of automatic doors with a hydraulic hiss and the scratch of metal-on-metal.  “Good to see you, captain”, the lizard remarked with a razor smile.

Wolf didn’t deign to let any emotion show on his face.  “Can’t say the same about you.”  He dragged a foldout chair from a shadowy corner and propped it open, sitting himself directly across from Leon at a reasonable distance.  He sat there in silence for a few moments, studying his teammate – his captive.  “We had some good times”, he said at last, almost a whisper.

Leon laughed darkly, breathily.  “That we did.”  A contemplative look crept up his face.  “Remember the time we raided that caravan en route to Katina?”

“How could I forget”, Wolf supplied, trying to keep a grin of his own from growing.  The caravan in question was full of illicit goods that would make a killing on the black market – or so they’d been told by an informant via Pigma.  After a protracted dogfight with the caravan’s mercenary escort, they boarded the lead cruiser only to discover that the illegal goods in question were counterfeit stuffed animals designed to mimic a fad brand that was all the rage in Lylat that year.  And so they returned to Sargasso, their unexpectantly fluffy loot in tow.

Leon’s smile began to drop.  “You had to go and ruin it with your paladin complex though.”  They’d ended up pawning off the dumb things for cheap in various backwater systems – almost charitably.  Almost.

This time it was the lupine’s turn to laugh, every bit as dark as the chameleon’s.  “Oh _please_ ”, he shot off with a crooked grin.  “Don’t give me that crap – I’m not a hero by anyone’s stretch of the imagination.”

“Exactly.”  Leon looked dead serious, his previous, almost playful tone dropped with a bat of the eye.  “So why are you trying so hard to fool everyone?  To fool yourself?”  He shook his head chidingly.  “You might not be as bad as I am, Wolf, but you’re not one of _them_ – and you never will be.”

Wolf didn’t have to ask who ‘ _them_ ’ was – he knew exactly who they were, having railed about them more than a few times to none other than Leon himself when he was feeling particularly furious with the way life worked, or just flat-out drunk.  ‘They’ were the day-people: the _good_ people.  People born and raised in loving homes, on plentiful planets, whose minds he liked to believe weren’t even capable of conceiving the depths people like he and Leon had delved into.  The darkest secret of every criminal was that they wanted to be one of them, but never could.  Wolf himself had told Leon that – whether it was true of anyone besides himself or not, he couldn’t say.

“It doesn’t matter what I am”, he told the chameleon, wishing in his heart of hearts that it was really true.  “It doesn’t matter who _anyone_ is.  What matters is how we act.”  He stood up from his seat, casually folding it and stowing it back away, surprised and almost proud of himself at managing to not lose his cool and lash out at the cutthroat chameleon.

 “You can’t escape who you are, Wolf”, the lizard told him calmly as he backed away to leave.  “None of us can.”

The lupine turned back once more to look behind him as he left the room, and for a fleeting moment he almost felt bad for Leon.

_Almost_.

He left the room without saying anything else, leaving the lizard the last word.  As the doors slid shut behind him with the same pained, grating noise they made as he entered, he leaned against the wall and slowly slid his back down it, exhaling a ragged breath.  He knew the lizard was right – damn him.  Wolf could do whatever he wanted, but his past would never change.

Wolf sat there for a while, crouching up against the grimy wall of a stolen freighter, analyzing a spot of rust on the wall across from him that looked a bit like the main continent of Corneria.  He pretended that he could see the web-like network of the capital extend across it, and imagined the lives of those who lived within.  The lives of people who lived in the sun, and whose childhoods were filled with happiness.

Lives of people like Fox.

His heart suddenly lurched as he thought about the vulpine for the first time all day.  Another canine interrupted his nascent twinges of heartache, a careful smile on her face.  He thought this one was an improvement from her usual: less obnoxious, for one.

“Hey, cap’n”, she said almost calmly, her expression composed yet expectant.

“Hey”, he responded, not bothering to stand up from the floor.   He didn’t even want to think about what sort of bacteria were congregating on his back and underside.

Fay sat down with him, to his surprise.  Though perhaps not: sitting on the dirty floor of a freighter with a questionable history (Panther had found evidence to suggest it was used for smuggling illicit drugs) was fairly blasé for someone like Fay if half the stories she told about herself were true.  “Are you okay?”, she asked earnestly.

Wolf turned to stare at her for a few seconds, and started to laugh.

A real laugh at that, every bit as contradictorily good-natured yet undercut with a wild streak of dangerous as it always was.  “You’re asking _me_ if I’m okay?”, he asked as his laughter began to subside.  “News flash, kid: I’m the one who chewed the hell out of _you_ , not the other way around.  I should be the one asking that.”

Her smile faltered somewhat, but didn’t break, not fully.  “Well yeah, but you’re also the one sitting on the floor looking sad.”

“Touché.”

They sat there like that, peacefully.  No formal apologies were made, and none were accepted.  Wolf felt like he was being torn in two directions: one foot anchored firmly in his past, and the other stretching out towards the future, flailing to find a foothold – and even when it did find solid ground, the other one resisted, firmly planted in the dust of dead planets and dead people.

“Whatcha thinking about?”, Fay asked, rocking back and forth to the slightest degree, clearly unable to stay still for any extended period of time.

Wolf thought about the question for a moment.  “The past.  The future.”  He stared at that accidental map of rust across from him again.  “How to get from one to the other.”

Fay looked confused at his statement.  “That’s easy – it just happens!”

He chuckled to himself.

“Yeah.  I guess it does.”

 

……….

 

The sky was overcast as their stolen freighter landed at the Spire.  The steely, reflective buildings mirrored the pale iron-colored sky, set against the backdrop of an ocean that looked like it was made of mercury.  Corneria was very gray today, Wolf thought as he jumped the side of the freighter and onto the platform.

It was then that it all started to catch up to him – for a fleeting second, he almost collapsed onto himself, the sheer exhaustion of the mission pummeling into him at maximum force.  He realized he hadn’t slept in two days as he walked through the motions of shaking hands and forced pleasantries with their welcoming party in a haze.  He didn’t recognize any of their greeters: no Peppy, no Hugin, no… whatever the raccoon’s name was, damn him if he’d bother committing it to memory.

Fay buoyantly approached the crowd, holding Melis’ paw in her own with one of her trademark vice grips, almost like she was scared the squirrel would run away.  Panther rounded out their little cadre, lucid once more, all trace of that anesthetic miasma gone, and holding a certain chameleon by an electric leash attached to a pair of manacles.

Their welcoming committee looked surprised at and confused by the newcomers Star Wolf had picked up along the way.  One of them asked why they were (Wolf wasn’t sure which, they were all interchangeable feds in their neat little tactical uniforms), and Wolf shot them a toothy grin.

“Bonuses.  And I want extra for them.”

 

……….

 

The trip into the bowls of the Spire was even longer and duller than he’d remembered it being, probably because he didn’t have a certain vulpine he could use to distract himself by staring at his ass.  Leon’s ass wasn’t nearly as nice of a sight.

One of the agents spirited said lizard away, presumably to be thrown in a holding cell, while the remaining four of them were corralled and marched down the series of dark corridors to that same meeting room where he’d been assigned this mission in the first place.  The shadowy complex was much busier this time though, with nervous-looking agents flitting to and fro like hyperactive hummingbirds, their conversations falling to a hush as Wolf and his crew approached.  He made sure to smile threateningly at each and every agent who went quiet in his presence.

They entered the ratty old corkboard-ridden room to find a bit of a crowd already assembled.  Hugin was there, naturally, apparently having been pacing back and forth while waiting for them to arrive – Peppy, too, looking much calmer, with a mug of coffee in his paw.  “Where’s the raccoon?”, Wolf asked as means of an introduction.  He wasn’t in the mood to bandy around with small talk.

Hugin harrumphed.  “Agent Rentador is busy.”  The raven moved to the table and took a seat, gesturing for Wolf and his company to do the same.  He paid special attention to Melis.  “Who is this?”, he directed at Wolf.

The lupine nodded at her, and she cleared her throat.  “My name is Melis.  I am – _was_ , Lady Catarina Illya’s most trusted aide.”  She paused, and Wolf noticed her wringing her paws somewhat.  “I was the one who sent the communique, and who met with Star Wolf.”

Peppy nodded pleasantries of his own, but Hugin wasn’t having any of it.  “Explain”, the avian demanded, leaning forward and steepling the fingers of his wings.

And so Melis explained.  And explained.  And _explained_.  And Wolf, Panther and Fay chimed in at the pertinent bits.  Lady Illya’s dealings with General Baloz, Baloz’s disappearance and his sudden return, Volskov’s assassination, Baloz’s successful gambit to take control of the Enclave’s resources and finances, the shadowy armada amassing in Octovar – everything.

By the time they were done explaining, Hugin looked like he was ready to stroke out, and Peppy had an expression more unsettled than anything Wolf had ever seen from him before – which granted, wasn’t saying a lot, he didn’t exactly hang around the rabbit as a rule.  The old hare made eye contact with the raven.  “What do you think?”, he asked.

Hugin leaned back in his chair and stared at Melis for a solid thirty seconds before finally speaking up.  “I believe her.  I believe all of them.”  He looked at Star Wolf then, and for just a second Wolf thought he might have actually seen respect in that gaze.  It must have been a trick of the light.  “Send her out – the rest can stay.”

Melis bowed respectfully and lent her own paw to one of the agents in the room, who proceeded to lead her out.  She made eye contact with Wolf as she left – he couldn’t decipher what, if anything, she felt.

“We’ll keep her safe”, the raven intoned.

“In a cell?”, Panther asked, not impolitely.  Wolf was jealous of that sometimes – how Panther could cut through the crap without doing so in an offensive way.

Hugin shrugged.  “Yes and no.  She’ll have comfortable furnishings and free reign of certain areas, but we can’t let her out and about.”

Peppy nodded at Hugin’s pronouncement.  “It sounds cruel, but it’s for her own safety as much as anything else.  When Baloz finds out she’s alive – and that’s a ‘when’, not an ‘if’ – she’ll have a target as big as any painted on her back.”

Wolf folded his arms.  “Who _is_ Baloz, anyway?  Yeah, yeah, I know – Anglar general, whatever”, he cut off before Hugin doubtlessly reamed him out for being unaware of current events – he wasn’t _that_ out of the loop.  “But why and how is he such a big deal?”

The raven grumbled something rude-sounding under his breath, and Peppy shot him a look of warning before speaking up himself.  “The Anglar Empire had two fleets – the Emperor called them his left and right hands.  Baloz led the Left Hand Armada.”  He let his words sink in.  “The one that attacked Aquas.”

Wolf felt himself squirm involuntarily in his seat.  “I didn’t know he was that high in the hierarchy.”  The stuff the Anglar fleet got up to on Aquas was the stuff of legends: tragic, horrifying legends.  “You have any idea who his benefactor is?”

Peppy shook his head solemnly, and Hugin grumbled again at the action.  “You shouldn’t be sharing state secrets with contractors”, he said.

The hare chuckled.  “We have no secrets _to_ share”, he said with a smile.  “That’s exactly the problem.”

“The fact we have no secrets is, itself, a secret”, Hugin spat.  He turned back to Wolf.  “Anyway, you… _mostly_ succeeded in your mission”, he admitted like it was a mild catastrophe.  “You retrieved the necessary information about the third party – without it, we wouldn’t know anything about General Baloz, his benefactor; any of it.  You also captured a criminal with a bounty, which you’ll be receiving in addition to your mission payment.”

Wolf nodded, pleased as pie with this information.  But something was nibbling at the back of his mind.  “Speaking of missions – how did yours go?  With capturing the Enclave?”

Hugin went dead silent, and Wolf saw a sort of cold fury writ large across his face – not directed at him, mercifully.  “It failed”, he admitted at length.

Peppy frowned.  “Rentador’s operation was a success, even with the jumped-up timetable – thanks for cluing us in on that, by the way”.  Wolf nodded and the hare continued.  “Anyway, we got ‘em; most of them, that is, the ones who surrendered and didn’t get killed in the fight.”

“Sounds like it went fine”, Panther purred, earning a look of rebuke from Hugin.

“It didn’t”, the avian said.  “We had to let them go.”

If Wolf had been drinking something he knew he would’ve spat it out.  “ _What!?_   Why?”

Hugin looked as flabbergasted and irate as he felt.  “Because there wasn’t any evidence to press charges with – Baloz wiped it all clean when he took control of their accounts.  Oh, the evidence is out there, don’t kid yourself; but that damn Anglar has all of it.”

“Along with all of their _everything_ ”, Peppy near-lamented.

The table went silent for a moment before Fay of all people spoke up.  “Well at least you don’t have to worry about them anymore?”  Her remark elicited a scoff from Hugin and a put-upon smile from Peppy.

Wolf stood up from his seat – as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over.  “Alright.  Wire us the payment sometime today.”

The raven looked indignant at Wolf’s decision to adjourn his meeting, but Peppy simply nodded – he knew Wolf would always do things his own way, and trying to fight it would be like trying to corral a river.  “Will do”, he said with a genteel nod.  “Say ‘hi’ to Fox for me”, he added, that fatherly twinkle in his eye that made Wolf profoundly uncomfortable.

The lupine only grunted in response, turning to leave the room while Panther and Fay made more socially appropriate departures.

He only had one thing on his mind – one thing he wanted to do.

And damn him, he was going to do it.

 

……….

 

Wolf paced back and forth in the small park, ignoring the slight scattering of raindrops that danced across his face every few seconds.  ‘Spritzing’, as his father used to put it: rain that wouldn’t fully commit to being rain.

He was alone in the chunk of greenspace: a small courtyard set between towering buildings, densely covered with greenery.  He was grateful for it – he was in the mood to speak to one person and one person only, and if anyone else besides that person were in his vicinity, he probably would’ve intentionally scared them off.  No, it was all for the best that he was alone on this misty, gray Cornerian day; for the best that he didn’t create a scene or cause any incidents.

His cybernetic eye caught infrared movement in the periphery of the little park, and a stray tangent of vulpine scent brought him a sense of ease.  He was scared at how reliant he’d come to be on this as an anchor.  He was scared at relying on _anything_ as an anchor besides himself.

Fox came into his proper, biological field of view, with a complex play of emotions on his face.  Joy at seeing Wolf, worry about how he fared on the mission (Wolf was sure he’d heard it all from Peppy at this point, it’d been a few hours since the briefing) – the lupine drank it in like a man parched from wandering the desert.  But he didn’t let his need show; he didn’t want Fox to think of him as desperate for him, even if it was true.

The vulpine approached with a worried smile, a gentle, welcoming raise of his paw, and an understated “hey”.  Wolf interrupted it with a fierce hug.  He pulled the vulpine towards him and held him in that grip, his arms curled tightly around Fox’s body, his muzzle in the crook of his neck.  Fox was obviously stunned by the unexpectantly vulnerable display of emotion, but quickly caught on, gently nestling his arms around Wolf in turn.

They stood embraced like that for a few moments before Fox sniffed the air and spoke, breaking that idyll.  “…Have you been drinking?”, he asked, his voice obfuscated by its place in Wolf’s chest.

The lupine chuckled.  “A little bit.  Not too much.”

“Define ‘too much’”, Fox shot back.

“You’re catching on”, Wolf said quietly.  He relaxed his grip on Fox and let the vulpine go, making sure to still stay as close as possible.  “I’ve had a rough day.”

Fox frowned.  “You’ve been gone for two days.”

“Exactly.”

They sat side-by-side on a fairly uncomfortable stone bench, arms around each other’s waists.  Wolf saw a memorial plaque commemorating something hewn into its side, but he couldn’t be bothered to read it.  What did the past matter when he had Fox here?

“I, uh… I heard about your ships”, Fox ventured.

Wolf sighed.  He’d putting off having to think about that.  “Yeah”, he responded.  He hoped that one word would be enough to convey how he felt about the situation.

It was a vain hope.

The vulpine gently rubbed his paw in circles on Wolf’s back.  “What do you think you’re going to do?”

Wolf took a moment to think about it, letting Fox comfort him to the best of his ability.  “We’re going to have to buy new fighters – that’s the most important thing.  Can’t be aerial aces without being able to fly.”  He paused for a beat.  “That’ll eat up most of our cash, though: good fighters are expensive.  We won’t have enough for a home-ship.”

Fox’s paw slowed down, settling on the small of Wolf’s back.  “…We have a home-ship”, he said quietly.

Wolf turned to him to look him in the eye, attempting to confirm the truth of what he’d just heard.

“I mean”, Fox started rambling.  “It’d be a little cramped, and it’s more of a temporary solution than anything else, but we have the space.  At least until Star Wolf has enough funds for a new one.  I also know some people who could get you high-class fighters for a good deal, you could come with me and –”  He stopped as Wolf started laughing.  “What?”, he asked indignantly.

“You”, the lupine responded, grinning at Fox like a madman.  “We’ve been on two dates,”

“ _One date_ ”, Fox grumbled.

“and you’re suggesting we move in together?  Seems a bit fast, Fox.  Maybe you’re in the wrong field of work – ever consider a racing gig?”

“It’s not like that”, Fox declared, before his solid expression started to waver.  “I mean, it’s a _little_ bit like that, but what else are you going to do?  How can you take missions without a ship capable of warp?”

Wolf ruffled the fur on Fox’s head, earning an indignant glare.  “Calm down, pup.  You’re right.”

Fox’s ears perked a bit.  “…I am?”

“Yes”, Wolf said.  “It’s the best solution.  For now.”

“For now.  Right.”

“You ask your teammates about this?”

Fox looked flustered.  “Well, not _yet_ , but –”  He was interrupted by more laughter from Wolf.  “I’m sure they’ll be fine with it.  Our teams have worked together plenty of times at this point.  We have good synergy.”

He let out a surprised, embarrassingly high-pitched noise as Wolf suddenly launched into him and pushed him onto his back on the bench.  The lupine leaned over him, straddling him, his muzzle bare inches from his own.

“’Good synergy’, huh?”  Wolf took a moment to thoroughly enjoy the play of emotions on Fox’s face.

“Yes”, the vulpine responded, trying (and failing) to sound dignified.

Wolf leaned in those last few inches and stole a kiss, more chastely than he initially intended, a little thing that left the phantom sensation of Fox’s muzzle on his own as he leaned back away.  He nuzzled Fox’s neck once more, eliciting an undignified sound from the vulpine.

They lay like that together, and Wolf thought – for just a moment – that he could forget all of it.  His family, his ship, his old teammates.

His sins.

He did his best to keep the shadowy tendrils of his past away, batting at them ineffectively, like swinging at cloudbanks with a tennis racket.

Fox must have noticed his shift in demeanor, because he stirred beneath him.  “Wolf?”

“Hmm?”, the lupine responded distractedly.

“…You know you can talk to me, right?  Like…” he floundered, trying to find the words.  “About anything.”

Wolf paused, and considered that.  “…Maybe someday.”

Fox nodded, accepting that as the best he was going to get, and relaxed once more, entwined with and wrapped in the arms of the lupine.

Wolf held him, and willed the tendrils to cease their hunting.  And for just a moment, he was at peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that wraps up The Winds of Fichina.
> 
> So here are updates on whatever:
> 
> I've just been accepted into a doctorate program, so I'm staring down the barrel of what will soon be a more limited amount of free time to write stories, which is a mixed bag of emotions. I'm 100% dedicated to continuing Worlds of Lylat (suffice to say, as if it wasn't obvious from the end here, there's quite a bit more of this overarching story I have loosely planned-out), but I'm not 100% sure of how updates are going to proceed in terms of timing. I'd like to ideally get to Story #6 before I start school again, because the end of that one will mark the end of Act I, but I'm not sure if that's realistic. I think, from here on out, I'm going to write the stories to completion first, then post chapters of the completed works on a weekly basis after they're done - that way, if you see a new chapter posted, you'll know for sure that subsequent chapters are coming regularly and there won't be month-long breaks between them. On the flip-side, that means the breaks between stories themselves will be quite a bit longer - but I think that's the best way to do it. I'm also going to continue spacing out entries of WoL with goofy little one-shots and other stories in between them, so it'll probably be quite some time before this series is completed.
> 
> As for Story #5 - it's going to be more Fox/Wolf-centric, but unlike Zoness and Katina it's going to be a multi-chapter story. I can't say for sure when to expect it though.
> 
> Thanks for all the kudos and comments, criticism is always welcome. And have a good weekend!


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